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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The Christian Crusade 



FOR 



World Democracy 



By 

S. EARL TAYLOR 

and 

HALFORD E. LUCCOGK 




THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



Copyright, 1918, by 
THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 



AUG 17 1918 

S)CI.A503261 



-°^ 



5*32, 
")/8 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Foreword 7 

I. Making Democracy Safe for the World 11 

II. Christian Democracy for Latin America 35 

III. China — The Open Door to Four Hundred Million 

Minds . 63 

IV. A World Program 89 



LIST OF MAPS 

PAGE 

1. The World Neighborhood 17 

2. South America 37 

3. Methodist Responsibility in South America 40 

4. Literacy Chart of South America 44 

5. Panama 50 

6. Mexico 54 

7. China .65 

8. Christian University Centers of China 73 

9. Hospital Map of China 83 



FOREWORD 

The appended chapters are issued in brief form and are tentative. 
They are issued in this form: First, so that they may be used at the 
Summer Institutes and Conferences. Second, that a large circle of 
friends may have opportunity to criticize and offer suggestions. Third, 
as a foretaste of what is coming when the final work is done. 

It is our purpose to issue, under the auspices of the Joint Cente- 
nary Committee, two text-books. One will be on the home field; the 
other will be on the foreign field. 

The summer Conference edition of this book contains only four chap- 
ters. The complete book will have eight chapters, the four included in 
this edition and four additional chapters. The titles of the additional 
chapters will be as follows : 

Chapter 5. The Leaven of Freedom at Work in India. 

Chapter 6. Flood Tide in the Destiny of Africa. 

Chapter 7. The Christian Mastery of the Pacific. 

Chapter 8. The Eebuilding of Europe. 

In the meantime, will you consider yourself a committee of one 
to write your definite criticisms and suggestions so that we may have 
them in time for the final editorial revision ? 

D. D. Forsyth, Chairman, 

S. Earl Taylor, Executive Secretary, 

Joint Centenary Committee of the 
Methodist Episcopal Church, 

111 Fifth Avenue, New York. 
Frank Mason North, 

Secretary Board of Foreign Missions. 



This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something 
far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation. . . . And 
we live in it. 

— H. G. Wells, in Mr. Britling Sees It Through. 

Would that men could see that we are living not only in the crisis 
of the greatest war that has ever afflicted mankind, but also in the 
Advent of Revolution, at once material, moral, and spiritual; wider, I 
believe, and deeper than any which in some thousand year3 has trans- 
formed civilization on earth. We are on the eve of what must prove 
to be a revaluation of our habits and thoughts. Now, in a state of 
revolution things move, change, appear, and disappear with lightning 
velocity. Things which we imagine to be trifles suddenly swell up into 

incalculable forces. Changes which in normal times could hardly be 
worked through in generations spring up completed in months or weeks. 
New things which were Utopian dreams of yesterday are truisms and 
facts to-day. A state of revolution is a social earthquake, in which 
neither things nor persons remain what they were. All are inverted. 

■ — Frederic Harrison. 

All the world i3 in the melting pot. Old things are passing away. 
All things may become new, not as a result of magic, not because of 
chance, not because of the war, but because through the Christian 
churches there shall be sufficient leadership to take hold of these nations 
of the Near East, of all parts of Europe that may need our ministry, as 
well as the Far East, Southern Asia, Africa, and Latin America, to lead 
them out into the new and better age. 

— John B. Mott. 

Trumpeter, sound for the splendor of God! 
Sound the Music whose name is law, 
Whose service is perfect freedom still, 
The august order that rules the stars I 
Bid the anarchs of night withdraw. 
Too long the Destroyers have worked their will. 
Sound for the last, the last of the wars ! 
Trumpeter, rally us, rally us, rally us, 
On to the City of God. 

— Alfred Noyes. 



CHAPTER I 

MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE FOR THE WORLD 

In the years of the great war the world has crossed a 
new International Date Line. It is impossible for anyone 
to estimate accurately the full significance of the time in 
which he lives, but there is a widespread unanimity of opin- 
ion that only one date has surpassed in importance to man- 
kind these days in which we live. That date is the shining 
peak of time which separates A. D. from B. C. In 1910 the 
world's missionary conference at Edinburgh declared, "The 
next ten years will in all probability constitute a turning 
point in human history. ' ' If ever a prophecy was fulfilled 
beyond the farthest dream of those who made it, it was that 
one. For while it would doubtless have proved true from 
the natural development of forces then in sight, even had 
there been no war, the convulsion which has shaken civiliza- 
tion to its foundations is effecting changes so momentous 
and has brought into action forces so powerful that no mind 
can gauge their possibilities. The future will in all proba- 
bility look back on these years, not merely as a turning point 
in history, but as determining the destiny of mankind for 
ages to come. 

A Wokld Situation 

It is not an exaggerated use of language to say that for 
the first time in history there has developed a world situa- 
tion. The phrase has often been used before, but until the 
present conflict drew the whole world into its vortex, no one 
train of events has ever bound up the destinies of all nations 
together. During the early days of the war the question 
was frequently asked, "What shall it be called? By what 
name shall it be known in history ?" Some, with pathetic 
optimism, proposed to call it "The War of 1914." For a 

11 



12 CHRISTIAN CKUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

long time we vainly imagined it might be called, "The 
European "War." The question is asked no longer. The 
titanic explosions of the conflict have burst the bonds of 
geography. It has named itself — i l The World War. ' ' And 
that very name, "The World War," is more than a geo- 
graphical measurement. It is history. For it records one 
of the greatest results of the war so far, the discovery of the 
world as a whole. It is prophecy as well. For the conflict 
is not only an appalling war of the world, hut a war for a 
world, a new world. The hope of mankind for that new 
order of life, is gathered up in the words in which President 
Wilson has voiced the mind and heart of the allied nations — 
' ' The world must be made safe for democracy. ' ' 

There are four great aspects of the present tumultuous 
days of conflict which have brought to the Church of Christ 
the largest opportunity and the gravest challenge which it 
has ever faced. The first is the agony and loss of battle, 
which can neither be conceived nor computed, the fact that 
we are living under the shadow of the greatest world trag- 
edy in the history of mankind. The second is the utterly 
new consciousness of the world as a whole. The third is 
that the world, both as a result of the war and of forces 
which preceded it, is in the most plastic and formative state 
it has ever had. The fourth is the fact that by far the larger 
portion of the human family has set out on a crusade for 
the winning and guarding of democracy. These four aspects 
of the present world situation intermingle and overlap at 
many points, but each brings its distinct and overwhelming 
call to the Christian Church. 

A Shatteked Civilization 

Whatever may be thought of the causes of the war, or 
its outcome, a world engaged in slaughter on an unpre- 
cedented scale ; a world in agony, in mourning and in ruins 
presents a searching test to Christianity. The cost of the 
conflict in suffering, in death, in destruction, outruns the 
power of the fleetest imagination to conceive. Colossal and 



MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE 13 

malignant forces of destruction have been at work which 
make all former wars, even those of Napoleon, seem like 
sham battles. Two thirds of the human race are directly 
involved in the conflict, and every other human being indi- 
rectly. Over forty-two million of men are under arms, not- 
withstanding the losses already met with. In no previous 
war were there more than 2,000,000 men lined up against 
each other. At the close of 1917 more than 6,000,000 had 
been killed in action ; 1,000,000 men, women, and children had 
been brutally massacred ; 3,000,000 had died of starvation ; 
6,000,000 were lying wounded in military hospitals and as 
many more were captives in prison. Unnumbered thou- 
sands have been sent home permanently crippled, blinded, or 
deformed. Think what these figures mean when translated 
into terms of human heartache! The cost in money, the 
large burden of which future generations must bear, runs 
into billions in a way that simply numbs our senses and con- 
veys little meaning. At the beginning of 1918 the daily cost 
was over $130,000,000. Three and a half years of war 
brought an increase of $111,700,000,000 in the public debt of 
the twelve leading war nations. During the first and cheap- 
est year of the war the cost was greater than all the national 
debts in the world combined. To this must be added things 
which cannot be hinted at in figures at all, the burdens of 
future years, the legacies of hatred, and the setting-back of 
many forces of social progress. What message do these 
things spell out to the disciples of the Prince of Peace ? 

Has Christianity Failed 1 ? 

It was but natural that many should jump to the conclu- 
sion that Christianity had failed. That after nineteen cen- 
turies of Christian influence, the so-called Christian nations 
should be involved in so terrible a carnage was for many a 
self -sufficient proof of the failure of Christianity. And, in- 
deed, let it be confessed freely, no section of the Christian 
world is entitled with easy complacency to shove the entire 
guilt on any other section. There is in the crisis an element 



14 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

of judgment, which must bow all Christendom in humility 
and contrition. 

The sober thought of men, however, has come to see that 
it is a travesty to call the forces which have launched the war 
Christianity. It is the distortions of and substitutions for 
Christianity which have failed to insure a peaceful and se- 
cure world order — the crass materialistic philosophy of life, 
a rampant and aggressive autocracy with an immoral theory 
of the state as above law, a pagan trust in power and the ele- 
vation of power as the supreme good with the denial of the 
claims of human brotherhood. When these forces run their 
course and produce a world holocaust, is it the gospel of the 
Son of Man which has failed ? There is profound truth as 
well as brilliance in Mr. Chesterton's word: "Christianity 
has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found 
difficult and not tried." Everything else has been tried. 
Commerce has been vaunted for a generation as the saviour 
of the world's peace. A writer 1 in 1907, in a book called The 
New Internationalism, stated that "the dollar sign is rap- 
idly supplanting the cross as a factor in international 
peace." That was the kind of thing multitudes of people 
were commencing to believe. We have been witnessing for 
four years the kind of "new internationalism' ' the dollar 
mark creates, in Belgium and France, Poland and Armenia. 
Scientific progress, diplomacy, military power and Western 
civilization have all been exploited as the guarantee of the 
world's peace and plenty— and they have all gone up in 
smoke. One thing has to-day found a shining place in the 
sun and that is the everlasting truth that there is none other 
name given in heaven or earth whereby men must be saved 
but Jesus Christ. In clear, shining sunlight such as it has 
never been seen before during nineteen hundred years, is 
the truth that nothing can save individuals, homes, commu- 
nities and the world except Christ — Christ a living reality in 
the whole life of the people throughout the world. "The 



Harold Bolce. 



MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE 15 

world's supreme need demands the release of the world's 
supreme power for righteousness. ' ' 

The Only Hope of Peace 

Men may devise "Leagues to Enforce Peace" of a hun- 
dred different varieties, and should devise them. But at the 
heart of it peace means brotherhood, and to say that broth- 
erhood has become the superlative necessity of the world is 
to say that Christ is the sole hope of the world because none 
other has been found to be a dynamic of brotherhood among 
mankind. 

The Church of Christ has not come to an hour of apol- 
ogy. Above the crash of the guns and through them has 
sounded the call for aggression, to let loose in force and di- 
mensions as never before the only true peace-making power 
on earth, the gospel of Christ. The United States is com- 
mitted, in the words of her President, to a war to end war. 
"We shall fight,' ' he says, "for a universal dominion of 
right, by such a consent of free peoples as shall bring peace 
and safety to all nations and shall make the world itself at 
last free." Such a program involves nothing less than the 
evangelization of the world. Only religion can kill war, for 
religion alone creates the new heart. In the words of Dr. 
Fosdick, already become classic, "the missionary enterprise 
is the Christian campaign for international good will. We 
must see that it is so and handle it as though it were so. 
What the nations through their governments will slowly 
learn to do, loath to leave old precedents, bound by the sec- 
tarian narrowness of national loyalties, Christians must do 
now, and do with a lavish generosity that they have not prac- 
ticed hitherto. ' ' * 

The Discoveey op the Wokld 

The earthquake which has shaken the world down has 
shaken it together. It may seem like a paradox to say that 

*H. E. Fosdick, The Meaning of the Present Crisis. 



16 CHEISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

out of the bitterest strife of the ages has emerged the dis- 
covery that the world is one, but it is the truth. That dis- 
covery places upon the Christian Church an inescapable 
responsibility to shape and accomplish a program for the 
evangelization and emancipation of that united world. 

Millions of men have had in these last few years the 
experience of Keats : 

"Then felt I like some watcher in the skies 
"When a new planet swings into his ken." 

The new planet is our old world, but it has swung into 
the consciousness of men as a whole as never before. 

It has long been a commonplace that steam and elec- 
tricity have made the world a neighborhood, but the war has 
seized the old commonplace and made it bewilderingly vivid. 
The figure of a neighborhood is too spacious. The war is 
not so much a neighborhood quarrel as a fire in a tenement 
house where men are crowded together for life or death. A 
family in a tenement house has a highly substantial interest 
in the question whether the children across the hall play with 
matches. You cannot very well quarantine a fire in a tene- 
ment house. Nor can a war in this compacted and crowded 
home of the human family be quarantined. The flames of 
war which started in northern Europe soon spread down the 
corridors till two thirds of the race were involved in it. 

Terrible as has been the occasion which has brought the 
world together, there is a profound spiritual significance in 
such vast portions of the world uniting in effort and thought. 
It raises the curtain on a new era. On that frontier of free- 
dom which stretches from the English Channel clear down 
into Africa and Mesopotamia over twenty-five nations on 
the Allied side have answered "Here" to the great roll 
call of democracy. If i ' politics makes strange bed-fellows, ' ' 
the war has made still stranger trench-fellows. The Gurkha 
from India and the Arab, the Algerian, and Hottentot from 
Central Africa have spilled their blood along with the New 
Zealander, the Canadian and the Belgian in the cause of 




O o 

9 1 
I 3 

8 I 

A .3 

11 

8 8 



18 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

freedom. The American airman fights with a British gun 
from a French machine. The Fiji Islander has gone over 
the top with his French and American brothers. The Sikh 
from India rightly wears the Victoria Cross for high valor 
along with his English comrade in arms. Each in his own 
tongue repeats that glorious watchword of France — ' ' They 
shall not pass." 

Hunger, one of the strongest bonds that tie men to- 
gether, is playing its part too, as well as danger and hope, 
in bringing this new world-consciousness to the forefront. 
We cannot be parochial in our food. Hunger is teaching the 
world in a stern and memorable way the old truth that Grod 
Almighty has made all men of one blood to live together 
and to eat together. The war has given a mighty emphasis to 
President Wilson's words: "The world no longer consists 
of neighborhoods. The whole is linked together in a com- 
mon life and interest such as humanity never saw before 
and the starting of wars can never again be a private and 
individual matter for nations." 

The thundering call to the Christian Church is plain — 
if the world is one whole and a scourge in it cannot be quar- 
antined, the cure for that scourge must not be. No part of 
the world is safe till all is safe. Democracy cannot be safe 
anywhere until it is safe everywhere. Ignorance and dark- 
ness and vice and degradation can no more be quarantined 
than war. We cannot save the world by homeopathic por- 
tions of the gospel, here a little and there a little. A united 
world demands of a world church, a world-program. 

A New World at Birth 

The plastic condition of a world in ferment, in the melt- 
ing pot of revolution and change, presents a providential but 
fleeting opportunity to the church to furnish a Christian 
foundation for the new structure. The world has never 
stood still, and ever since the days of Pentecost there has 
been abundant opportunity for Christian influence. But 
never have there been at one time such revolutionary forces 



MAKING DEMOCBACY SAFE 19 

of different character at work throughout the whole world. 
What the character of the new structure will be no one can 
prophesy ; but that it will be new no one can doubt. 

"The rudiments of Empire here 
Are plastic yet and warm. 
The chaos of a mighty world 
Is rounding into form." 

"When God rubs out," said Bousset, "it is because he is be- 
ginning to write. ' ' If there ever was a time in the history of 
the Christian Church when the establishment of the world- 
wide kingdom of God should be the dominating thought and 
purpose of the united body of Christ, that hour has just 
dawned upon us in these tragic, pregnant days. Every- 
where we look, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, men 
and nations are in upheaval and we see conditions which 
demand the concentration of the unifying and guiding forces 
of Christendom. If the church as a great missionary force 
does not rise to a great occasion now, it will not be because 
she can ever hope to get a bigger or a better one. 

Not all the changes of these days are on the credit side 
of the ledger. Many are terrible liabilities which will be a 
peril and obstacle to the Kingdom for years to come. But 
the very threatening of those new evils is itself an urgent 
call to Christian campaigning. 

Nor are all the revolutionary changes, particularly in 
the Far East and Africa and South America, the result of 
the war. They have been increasing in momentum for a 
decade and more. But they have been vastly accelerated 
and increased by the war. The revolution in Eussia, with 
all that it means for good and ill, moved forward by a leap 
of a generation at least, under the forcing process of the 
upheaval. 

The New Day in America and England 

In England and America, what tokens of a new world 
are already before our eyes ! The passage by Congress of 



20 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

the prohibition amendment, called by Bishop Bashford "the 
greatest piece of constructive legislation in American his- 
tory since the amendment prohibiting slavery ;" the rapid 
extension of woman suffrage in America and the admission 
of six million women to suffrage in Great Britain ; the new 
status of women industrially in both countries ; the progress 
of collective effort ; the wide extension of government con- 
trol of industry ; the progress of industrial democracy in the 
greater participation of labor in the profits and direction of 
industry ; the undreamt of revelation of resources in patriot- 
ism, generosity, and humanity — all these are indisputable 
signs of a new day. 

In Non-Chkistian Lands 

And if, as Kipling expresses it, taking "hold of the 
wings of the morning, ' ' we "flop around the earth, ' ' what do 
we see? Not only a new Europe, but also a new Asia, and in 
many respects a New Africa will emerge from the war. In 
India a new national consciousness is awake and large polit- 
ical changes are imminent ; China is searching for the ideas 
and the men that are to shape its future destiny ; Japan has 
gained a new position as a world-power and is experiencing 
within its own life great industrial changes. In the near 
and middle East the collapse of Islam's political power is 
bringing far-reaching changes in political and economic life 
of the peoples ; the Jews have won a new freedom and have 
been deeply stirred by the hope of regaining after two thou- 
sand years an independent national existence in their 
ancient home ; conservatism and prejudice are being broken 
down through new and wide contacts ; non-Christian nations 
are in a serious mood, of which dissatisfaction with the tra- 
ditional faiths of Asia and Africa is a convincing evidence. 
The masses of plain people practically everywhere are mov- 
ing toward Christ in larger numbers and with greater mo- 
mentum at this present time than at any time within the last 
fifty years. We are learning from the mass movement in 
India and the revivals in Korea that there is such a thing as 



MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE 21 

the Christianizing of families, villages, and tribes. " There 
is such a thing as the conversion of national aspirations and 
ideals. There is a sudden turning of the vast streams of hu- 
man history. It was seen in the days of Constantine, again 
in the days of Luther ; again under Napoleon. That stream 
is turning massively, irresistibly to-day.' ' * 

Now or Neveb 

This vast shifting to new foundations is more than op- 
portunity which Christianity can take or reject at its will. 
It is menace. The cause of Christ hangs in the balance. For 
the church, as far as we are concerned, it is now or never. 
If once this period of upheaval passes, and the new world 
which is now in the making, builds itself upon foundations 
which are as hostile or indifferent to Christ as were the 
foundations of the age which has gone down in ruins, the 
future of the church in this and the next generation will be 
an unutterable darkness. Christianity has now her chance, 
the great chance of all her long existence. She holds the key 
to humanity's unsolved problems. She is the steward of 
that which the world supremely needs. This is no time for 
a Christian leadership whose only military command is, "As 
you were ! ' ' The world will never be as it was. The church 
cannot afford to be as it was. It must respond in an ade- 
quate way to this God-given day. 

The Wae for Democracy 

The heart of the urgent call to us in the United States 
for world-wide Christian advance lies in the fact that we are 
engaged in a war for democracy; not merely for our own 
defense, but to make the world safe for democracy. To that 
sacred task we have dedicated our hearts, our money, our 
lives. Underlying all the thinking and acting of individuals 
and the nation must be the winning of the war. 

But thoughtful men have come in increasing numbers to 



1 W. H. P. Faunce, Social Aspects of Foreign Missions, p. 64. 



22 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

see that we have set our faces as a nation to a task which no 
military victory, however complete, can accomplish. The 
victory of arms which we pray and believe that God will 
bring to the allied nations, will remove the hindrance to a 
world free for democracy which lies in an aggressive autoc- 
racy bent on conquest. But with that hindrance removed, 
no mass of armies can bring into being the inner mental and 
moral and spiritual forces which must be created if safe 
democracies are to exist and flourish on the earth. No 
merely military victory can protect the two thirds of the 
world which lies distant from the battlefields from its in- 
ternal weakness and disorder. No military victory can 
foster the intelligence and moral character which are the 
foundations of democracy. Only the emancipating, educat- 
ing, and stabilizing forces of the Christian religion can do 
that. The task of the hour is one task. In it the two great 
passions of the human heart join and fuse — patriotism and 
religion. 

On the patriotic side it is to rid the world of the menace 
of the rampant despotism of Germany and her allies ; to free 
democracy from the material obstacle of aggressive autoc- 
racy. 

On the religious side it may best be stated by the re- 
versal of President Wilson's words, to make democracy safe 
for the world; io set at work those forces of education, moral 
control and religion among the backward peoples of the 
world without which democracy is ' ' a destruction walking at 
noonday." 

The Patkiotic Task 

Never must it drop from the mind that the cause of 
Christ has an overwhelming stake in the winning of the 
war. Some of the fairest hopes of the kingdom of God are 
bound up in it. The true freedom of the world cannot exist 
under the rule of materialistic power. The kingdom of God 
cannot tolerate a world where nations live by swagger and 
threat, where the ambition and philosophy of a few make 



MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE 23 

miserable all mankind. We fight "to vindicate the prin- 
ciples of peace and justice in the life of the world as against 
selfish and autocratic power . . . for the ultimate peace of 
the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German 
people included : for the rights of nations great and small 
and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of 
life and of obedience." * "We are fighting Germany because 
in this war feudalism is making its last stand against oncom- 
ing democracy. We see it now. It is a war against an old 
spirit, an ancient, outworn spirit. It is a war against feu- 
dalism — the right of the castle on the hill to rule the vil- 
lage beneath. ' ' 2 

Sadly as Christian men draw the sword, we need be in 
no confusion. We find in the New Testament no surrender 
of the chief aim of all, the commonwealth of humanity; no 
substitution of lesser loyalties for justice, truth, and right. 
We find, rather, as its climax a call to arms. There is to be 
battle, but without hatred to human foe. There is to be par- 
ticipation in the age-long, bitter struggle against an unseen 
foe that makes his stronghold in the minds of men, inciting 
them to war and conquest and the lust of selfish power. To 
such times as ours comes the message of Ephesians: "Fi- 
nally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power 
of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may 
be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we 
wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principal- 
ities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of 
this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. 
Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye 
may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done 
all, to stand. ' ' 

The nation has embarked on a great, unselfish, spiritual 
crusade to clear the pathway for God and it follows its sons 
across the sea with prayer. 



1 President Wilson, April 2, 1917. 

1 Franklin K. Lane, "Why We Are At War.' 



24 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

Where are you going, Great-Heart ? 
"To cleanse the earth of noisome things, 
To draw from life its poison-stings. 
To give free play to Freedom's wings." 
Then God go with you, Great-Heart 1 

Where are you going, Great-Heart? 
"To lift To-day above the Past; 
To make To-morrow sure and fast; 
To nail God's colors to the mast." 
Then God go with you, Great-Heart! 1 

The Missionaky Task 

To complete the task of the soldier demands an ade- 
quate and aggressive program for the world-wide extension 
of the kingdom of God. 

Two slogans of the third Liberty Loan campaign, when 
deeply studied, make this clear. One was "Halt the Hun." 
The other was "To make the world a decent place to live 
in." The second is the larger and longer task, and without 
its accomplishment success in the first will be largely fruit- 
less. The Allied armies, please God, will "Halt the Hun." 
But nothing can make the world "a decent place to live in" 
except the fundamental qualities of the spirit of Christ. 

The war is essentially a war for opportunity. The over- 
throw of tyranny means that the nations will be safe from 
outside interference. But only the extension of vital Chris- 
tianity throughout the world will ever mean that moral and 
spiritual forces will be unchained which will create the pos- 
sibility of world safety, save nations from internal sin, weak- 
ness, and disorder, and undergird them with purity and the 
spirit of justice and brotherhood. 

We are in this war in behalf of the democracy of the 
world. The greatest needs throughout this bleeding planet 
are, after all, those which touch the ideals and future of 
humanity. It is the function of the religion, the ethics, the 



^rom "The Vision Splendid," by John Oxenham. George H. Doran 
Company, Publishers. 



MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE 25 

power, the love that was brought by the Son of God to make 
the world safe for anything worth while. Jesus Christ alone 
can save the world. Guns cannot. They leave but a desert 
waste. The upbuilding of the world begins when war has 
spit its last bomb and thrust its last bayonet. Governments 
and armies never attempted to accomplish these results ab- 
solutely fundamental to the safety of democracy. There is 
but one institution in the world that has a program, the pur- 
pose of which is to bring about these tremendous structural 
changes ; that institution is the Church of Jesus Christ. 

Democracy Not Safe for the World To-day 

The boon which more than half the world's a-seeking — 
democracy — is not safe to-day. And after the war two 
thirds of the human race in Asia, Africa, half of America, 
and more than half of Europe will be as little prepared to 
safeguard democracy as they are to-day. 

Look at this proposition a little more closely. What is 
necessary for the safety of democracy? What, after all, is 
a true democracy? It is more than a republican form of 
government with the machinery of popular vote. Under 
republican forms of government, Mexico for years was a 
despotism ruled with a hand of iron. Still under a repub- 
lican form it was more closely anarchy for four recent years 
than anything else. England, under the form of a mon- 
archy, has had one of the freest democracies on earth. A 
true democracy is more than any form. It is a moral and 
spiritual order whose aim is the freedom, happiness, and 
welfare of the individual. James Eussell Lowell has denned 
democracy in plain words as that order in which every man 
has a chance and knows that he has a chance. 

Three great classic statements of the essence of democ- 
racy have been made. One is the watchword of the French 
Eevolution — "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. ' ' The sec- 
ond is in the words of the Declaration of Independence — 
"The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' ' 
The third is in the immortal words of Lincoln — "A govern- 



26 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

ment of the people, by the people, and for the people. ' ' At 
heart democracy is a faith, a faith in a common humanity, 
a belief that men are essentially the same kind of stuff and 
that only by the cooperation of all, by the recognition of all 
as the common partners, with equal dignity of membership, 
can any progress worth the fighting for be obtained. 

What Democeacy Rests On 

The foregoing description of democracy is not a quota- 
tion from the New Testament, but it comes from it neverthe- 
less. It needs no long argument to convince that this order 
of life can never be realized till it rests on the foundation of 
the world's first and greatest democrat — Jesus Christ. 

Ask yourself what it is that has made democracy safe 
in America. And when we speak of our own land, we speak 
not as though we had attained but as though we press on to 
the mark of our high calling. The more ardent our patriot- 
ism the more ready we are to see and confess our imperfec- 
tions of democracy, and the more ready to strive to correct 
them. The call of the present day is strong on America to 
free herself from all undemocratic blights — its race prej- 
udices, class distinctions, economic injustices. Neverthe- 
less, our heritage of freedom is large ; and it is easy to see 
the forces which have made it so. 

The Church 

The gospel of Christ and the church which proclaims it 
are the undergirding of freedom in America. Other founda- 
tion for democracy can no man lay than that which is laid 
in Christ. It came from him. That was a fine and uncon- 
ventional tribute to Christ paid by Decker, ' ' The first true 
gentlemen that ever breathed." He was also, as Lowell 
points out, the first true democrat who ever lived. The 
world knew nothing of the rights of the common man till 
Christ brought to earth the revelation of the infinite value of 
every soul. The democracies of Greece and Rome were for 



MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE 27 

the few, resting on slavery for the many, and soon perished. 
No one before ever voiced the value and unspoken hopes of 
common humanity. 

"He was the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea." 

The Bible has been woven into the very texture of 
American life. ' i The existing government of this country, ' ' 
said William H. Seward, " could never have had existence 
but for the Bible. ' ' The moral foundations of national char- 
acter, without which no free state can stand, have sprung 
from Christian ideals and been sustained by them. 

The Home 

The home has played an incalculable part in the build- 
ing and safe-guarding of free institutions, in America and 
everywhere it has flourished. It is the training school of 
reverence, of sympathy, of obedience, and self-control, with- 
out which on a widespread scale a republic is a mockery. 
The home as we know it, with its reverence for womanhood, 
its solicitude for childhood, its ideals, has never appeared 
apart from Christianity. ' ' The Cotter 's Saturday Night, ' y 
by Robert Burns, is more than a beautiful picture of a Chris- 
tian home in the Scotch Highlands. It is a profound piece 
of political philosophy : 

"From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs 
That makes her lov'd at home, rever'd abroad." 

The School 

It is an axiom that where the people rule they must be 
fitted to rule. Education or chaos is the only alternative in 
a democracy. The demagogue or tyrant will rule the peo- 
ple who are not educated. Shipwreck is as sure as when 
a blind pilot undertakes to steer a ship through the rocks. 
Let the anarchy in Mexico and the collapse in Russia enforce 
the truth. 



28 CHEISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

Public Opinion 

Public opinion is king in a true democracy. "With no 
widespread devotion to ideals on the part of the multitude, 
no capacity for moral indignation with which the govern- 
ment must reckon, freedom is not sustained. ' ' Eternal vigi- 
lance is the price of liberty. ' ' 

The Need of the Wokld to Be Fitted foe Democracy 

How fares the world in respect to these essentials of 
true democracy? Over one half of the population of the 
globe can neither read nor write. By far the largest por- 
tion of that percentage is found in the non-Christian lands. 
Ninety-four per cent of the population of India are illiter- 
ate as against 7.3 per cent in the United States. In China 
the percentage of illiterates is even larger. What is the out- 
look for true democracy there! What can it be but black 
without speedy aid in education ? In Latin America the 
illiteracy ranges from 40 to 80 per cent; in Moslem lands, 
with the exception of Turkey, from 75 to 90 per cent. "In 
pagan Africa, apart from mission stations, the people do not 
even know that writing has ever been invented ! ' ' 

Nearly a billion people have never heard of Christ — 
almost two thirds of the population of the globe. That 
means they stand entirely apart from the whole range of 
influences associated with Christianity, the sense of the 
value of personality and human rights which work so 
mightily as incentives to progress. 

A safe democracy will come in these belated nations 
when Christ comes. It will come with the Great Democrat, 
not before. Up to the present time republican institutions 
have never flourished in any land where a free church has 
not preceded it to set up standards of Christian living and 
to lay the foundations in Christian ethics and character. 

The democracy without sure foundations is a menace 
to the rest of the world. The democracies of Russia, and 
China, and Mexico are illustrations of the fact that the 



MAXING DEMOCRACY SAFE 29 

world's safety may be disturbed at any time by internal 
quarrels in countries where 90 per cent of the population 
are illiterate. 

Has the Church a Program? 

Has the church a program to meet this world-circling 
and world-lifting task? No other institution on earth 
has. The Church of God has both the program and the 
credentials for the task. All that it needs is to be baptized 
into a new sense of the urgency and immensity of the 
task. It is a heart-breaking task, but it began in a heart- 
break on Calvary, a divine heartbreak over the need and sin 
of the world. 

The Christian program is the same as it has ever been 
since Christ sent out that first group of disciples into Gali- 
lee, preaching, teaching, and healing. It is lifting the 
world's life by those three levers. It preaches the gospel of 
the love of God, the redemptive power of God, and the king- 
dom of God as an order of righteousness, brotherhood, and 
service. In every environment that message has proved a 
germinating force of righteousness and social progress. In 
its schools of every kind which belt the earth — primary, 
secondary, and colleges, industrial and medical schools — it 
has plowed up the earth for the growth of self-realization 
and self-government. In its hospitals and social healing of 
every kind it has set moving forces of vast social trans- 
formation. 

It has the credentials. The missionary of the gospel 
has been the carrier of the democratic ideal to the four 
corners of the earth. It was through the missionary and 
those who came in his train that those vague forces which 
we together call Western civilization were created. 

The mainspring of human progress has been for nine- 
teen hundred years, and is to-day, the Christian faith. 
' ' The moral dynamic that transformed our wild forefathers, 
the Saxons, Celts, and Scandinavian, into civilized nations 
was not science, then unborn; not politics, literature or art; 



30 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

it was Christianity. ' ' 1 And the power that has in the last 
one hundred years aroused Asia and Africa and the islands 
of the Pacific from the sleep of centuries is not commercial 
or governmental but Christian. The credentials of the gos- 
pel of Christ for a world-task are well urged in the words 
of President Wilson : ' ' The gospel of Christ is the only force 
in the world that I have ever heard of that does actively 
transform the life ; and the proof of the transformation is to 
be found all over the world, and is multiplied and repeated 
as Christianity gains fresh territory in the heathen world.' ' 

The Centenaky Progbam op Methodism 

The Methodist Episcopal Church has planned to cele- 
brate the one hundredth anniversary of the beginning of 
Methodist missions by the only kind of a celebration that 
would fit this day. It has girded itself to face adequately 
its share of this world task. In a careful and thorough way 
it has surveyed its world field and estimated what it needs 
for a five-year term to attempt in a fair measure the 
Christianization of the one hundred and fifty millions in the 
non-Christian world for which it is solely responsible. It is 
a program of large dimensions, for a small program in this 
day would be none at all. It is the most far-reaching, the 
most daring perhaps, ever undertaken by any church. It 
involves a consecration of life, of prayer, and of money 
which is revolutionary. But the church cannot stay as 
a leader in a revolutionary world without becoming revolu- 
tionary too. The program calls for a church on its knees, 
and an offering of hundreds of its best sons and daughters 
for world-service and forty millions of dollars. 

It is a crusade that is God-timed. Timed, it is true, in 
days of burden and stress, but timed to a day when men are 
thinking in larger terms and there is a moral sacrificial 
temper in the hearts of men and a larger horizon to their 
minds than ever before. 



W. H. P. Faunce, Social Aspects of Foreign Missions. 



MAKING DEMOCBACY SAFE 31 

To accomplish this program means nothing less than to 
recover for the church the horizon of Christ. If this is not 
done, the church must sound a retreat at a time when the 
world outside the church is moving into a new age and 
drop back into a place of secondary importance in all that 
pertains to constructive spiritual leadership. We must "go 
on or go under. ' ' 

It can he done. The spirit of the church must be mobil- 
ized. The Christian spirit of adventure and of faith must 
be stimulated. We are come to the Kingdom for such a time 
as this. Spirit is the one really creative force in the world. 
Change the spirit of the church, and all else will follow, as 
the fruition of an intense life. 

We must give the Christian emphasis to words that in 
these days have burned themselves into the memory of every 
American. "A supreme movement of history has come." 
Our great and loved church, born with a world-parish as the 
destiny of her message and experience, has squared herself 
to make her world-task her supreme business. "God help- 
ing her, she can do no other. We must all speak, act and 
serve together. ' ' 



I honestly believe that no place in all this world needs the gospel 
as South America. — Robert E. Speer. 

Both the intellectual life and the ethical standards of these coun- 
tries seem to be entirely divorced from religion. The absence of a reli- 
gious foundation for thought and conduct is a grave misfortune for 
South America. — Lord Bryce. 

We are told that some day we shall have war with Mexico. How 
much our own fault it will be if such a lamentable conflict comes ! What 
Mexico needs is an invasion of schoolteachers and social workers and 
Christian preachers, who have caught the idea of missions in their 
international relationships; and if such an invasion is not forthcoming, 
a military invasion may indeed be necessary. — Harry E. FosdicJc. 

Latin America had a population of 15,000,000 a century ago ; to-day 
it has about 80,000,000. Formerly immigration was restricted to the 
Latin race. With transportation facilities multiplying and cheapened, 
and the Panama Canal open, these lands face all the congested areas 
in the world. On the east their doors open to Europe and Africa; on 
the west, to the millions of Asia. Latin America will have its day in the 
twentieth century. Calderon predicts a population of 250,000,000 by the 
end of the century. There are many who believe it can maintain a popu- 
lation of 500,000,000, or one third the world's present total. — Commission 
I — Conference on Christian Work in Latin America. 



CHAPTEE n 
CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY FOR LATIN AMERICA 

Chkistophek Columbus discovered South America in 
1498. About four hundred years later the United States 
began to catch up with him. 

The war has moved this process of rediscovering South 
America, which has been going on for many years, several 
speeds forward. The war has made lightning as well as 
thunder, and as by a vivid flash it has shown to us far more 
clearly than before our neighbors to the south. New trade 
relations have developed, many of them by necessity, and a 
new realization of a unity of interest between North and 
South America has been stimulated. Large fruits of this 
new discovery of South America are already manifest in the 
political, commercial, scientific, and the religious world. We 
are linked arm in arm with the largest of the republics of 
South America, Brazil, an ally in the war for democracy, and 
that new relationship has contributed to the new interest. 

Latin Amebica 

Other causes, notably the opening of the Panama Canal 
and our relations with Mexico, have brought into the mind 
of the country the larger area of which South America is a 
part — Latin America. It is a good name for citizens of the 
United States to learn — " Latin America/' It is good for 
our humility, for it reminds us of what we so easily forget, 
that the United States is not all there is to " America.' ' 
Latin America stretches from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn 
and includes Mexico, Central America, Panama, and three 
islands of the West Indies. Widely diverse in respect to 
progress, situation, and climate it has a common background 

35 



36 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

of language, tradition, and religion and similar racial stock. 
Its problems are to a large extent the same. It includes 
twenty nations, a population of 80,000,000 of people and an 
area of almost 8,500,000 square miles — three times the size 
of the United States. Eighteen millions are whites, 17,000,- 
000 Indians, 6,000,000 Negroes, and of mixed white and 
Indian, 30,000,000. Of mixed white and Negro there are 
8,000,000, 700,000 mixed Negro and Indian, and 300,000 
East Indian, Japanese, and Chinese. 

This vast area presents to the United States a maze of 
interesting possibilities in politics, in trade, fascinating to 
think of and plan for. 

But to the heart and conscience of the Protestant 
churches of the United States it presents more than that. In 
an hour when our eyes are set on the shining goal of a world 
safe for democracy, it presents the need of a group of na- 
tions struggling against tremendous handicaps in the enter- 
prise of democracy and pitifully lacking in many of the fun- 
damental necessities for a safe, free, and permanent democ- 
racy. It presents also the momentous question, What shall 
be the ideals which shall control the life of this vast section 
of the world, which unquestionably will hold within a cen- 
tury over 250,000,000 people? 

The Rediscovery of South America 

We are learning in the United States a new set of 
A B C's. That lesson is in the importance, present and 
future, of the A. B. C. countries, Argentina, Brazil, and 
Chile, the leading republics of South America. When these 
three countries came together with the United States and 
Mexico in conference at Niagara Falls in an attempt to settle 
our differences with Mexico, the conference failed to ac- 
complish that result. But it was highly successful in ac- 
complishing something else, just as important or more so — 
a new knowledge of South America on the part of the United 
States, and a new appreciation of the need and possibilities 



LATIN AMEEICA 



37 




SOUTH AMERICA— THE CONTINENT OF THE FUTURE 

The heavy black shading indicates the territory occupied by the Methodist Episcopal Church. 
The white spaces show the unoccupied territory for which it is responsible. The lighter vertical 
shading marks the countries in which the Methodist Church South is at work. 



of cooperation with her countries for great purposes of 
common interest. 



Eeasons for Neglect and Ignorance of South America 

There are many reasons for the ignorance of South 
America on the part of people in the United States, and most 



38 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

of them are not flattering. A self-satisfied complacency is 
one of the chief ones. Vague, incorrect ideas have found a 
congenial soil in our national hotbed of ignorance. We have 
taken Baron Munchausen as one of our leading authorities 
on South America, supplemented, perhaps, by 0. Henry and 
Richard Harding Davis. To large numbers of people, South 
America has been, and unfortunately is to-day, a land of 
"fevers and revolutions, ' ' a suitable theme for comic opera 
and exciting fiction. 

The American business man, "the hustler," whom we 
have raised into a myth of efficiency, has succeeded in get- 
ting only 29 per cent of the trade of Latin America largely 
because he has not taken the trouble to learn the facts about 
it. The trade of Latin America with the rest of the world 
has been growing far more rapidly than with the United 
States. The assumption that there was little in South 
America worth learning about has been a costly one and is 
coming to an abrupt end in the world of trade. 

A New Iettekest 

Many forces fortunately have conspired in the last few 
years to turn the eyes of the United States to South Amer- 
ica. The Panama Canal has made a new water map of the 
world and brought the west coast of South America within 
easy reach. The whiz of bullets across the Mexican border 
turned our eyes to the South and brought South America 
within view, as well as Mexico. Real information is begin- 
ning to filter through our hazy preconceptions and prej- 
udices. Travel has increased between the continents,. Vis- 
its of eminent statesmen like Mr. Root, Lord Bryce, Mir. 
Roosevelt, and scientific expeditions, have had wide educa- 
tional value. Trade with South America has increased and 
expanded in many directions and a new knowledge of the 
commercial and agricultural possibilities has quickened in- 
terest greatly. 

Striking expressions of this new interest abound. The 



LATIN AMERICA 39 

Pan-American Bureau, housed in a great building at Wash- 
ington, is a powerful organization under the active support 
of the President of the United States and the presidents of 
South American republics to promote closer relationship. 
In 1915 two conferences of immense importance were held 
in Washington. One was a gathering of financiers repre- 
senting twenty-one American republics, held under the aus- 
pices of the United States government. The second was a 
Pan-American Scientific Congress which brought a group of 
visitors from Latin America more broadly representative 
than any other group ever assembled in America. More 
deeply significant than either of these was the Congress on 
Christian work in Latin America which was held at Panama 
in February, 1916. Four hundred and eighty-one delegates, 
of whom 230 were appointed by denominational mission 
boards from practically all the Christian countries of the 
world, made up a congress unique in the New World's his- 
tory of missions. Its reports are the most exhaustive study 
of the social, educational, and spiritual conditions of Latin 
America ever made. Its results in closer cooperation and 
advance mark a new epoch in the history of missions in the 
two Americas. The turning of all these new streams of in- 
terest toward South America heralds a new day for the 
whole continent. 

The Magnitude of South Amebica 

To try to convey any vivid idea of the size of South 
America means a riot of the imagination. Kipling tells 
us that " there are forty different ways of inditing tribal 
lays ' ' and remarks that ' l every single one of them is right. ' ' 
There are also forty different ways of giving first aid to 
the imagination in its effort to consider the size of South 
America, and every single one of them is true. Have you 
an imperial mind that delights to "think in continents " I 
Then try this: South America is three times as large as 
China and four times as large as India. Brazil itself, the 



40 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 



ULIMA 

^ •Huancayo 

EECallao 



fourth largest country in the world, is larger than the whole 
of Europe. Perhaps your own country's size means more 
to you. Then remember that the whole United States could 

be put into Brazil and 
leave room for four 
States the size of New 
York. The Argentine 
Republic, which is cus- 
tomarily thought of as 
about as large as Penn- 
sylvania or, to be gen- 
erous, as Pennsylvania 
and New York, could 
hold all of the United 
States east of the Mis- 
sissippi plus the first 
tier of States west of it. 
Perhaps we think more 
clearly in terms of a 
smaller area. Try a 
"little" country like 
Venezuela. Texas, 
which we think of as an 
empire in itself, would 
go into Venezuela twice, 
leaving room for Ken- 
tucky and Tennessee. 
We call Chile i i the shoe- 
string republic, ' ' but we 
forget what a large shoe 
it would make a string 
for ! Narrow, it is true, 
but long enough to reach from New York to San Francisco 
and have enough left to tie a knot with. Its area is four 
times that of Nebraska. 

South America has larger areas unknown than any con- 
tinent, not excepting Africa. In no other continent could a 




PORTION OF SOUTH AMERICA IN WHICH 

METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

IS AT WORK 

This includes the leading republics of Argentine and 
Chile and a third of the population of the continent. 



LATIN AMERICA 41 

hunter plunge into the wilderness and emerge with a whole 
new, unknown river system as his game, as Mr. Roosevelt 
did in Brazil with the " River of Doubt.' ' 

Wealth 

The wealth of South America is literally boundless. 
Half the rubber of the world comes from tropical America. 
From Brazil alone comes four fifths of the world's coffee 
supply, and from its diamond fields more gems than any 
part of the world except South Africa. Argentina alone, in 
1914, possessed over 123,000,000 head of live stock — sheep, 
cattle, horses, pigs, etc. Chile produced in 1913 nitrates val- 
ued at $128,000,000. The supposedly barren wastes of Peru 
the same year yielded 1,700,000 tons of sugar cane, and from 
its mines was shipped $10,000,000 worth of copper. Inter- 
national trade has grown from $2,000,000,000 to $3,000,000,- 
000 in the last ten years ; and the Hon. John Barrett predicts 
that in the five years following the war it will increase to 
$5,000,000,000. 

The Futuke 

When we look toward the future, as we cannot help look- 
ing, the natural resources, coupled with its comparatively 
small population, make it clear that South America will wit- 
ness as great development in population, and economic and 
social transformation, as any other continent of the world, 
and very probably greater. It is the last great unoccupied 
area of the habitable world, except sections of Africa and 
Malaysia. The stream of immigration had already set in 
with a strong current before the war. In 1913 about a mil- 
lion immigrants landed in South America. There are nearly 
half a million Italians near Buenos Ayres in Argentina. 
Most of the emigration has been from Europe, but immi- 
grants are commencing to pour in from China and Japan, a 
movement of vast possibilities. As soon as the war is over 
streams of emigration from Europe will start and deepen. 
While the United States will undoubtedly receive some of it, 



42 CHEISTIAN CEUSADE FOE DEMOCEACY 

there is no more free land in North America. South Amer- 
ica will claim and receive the largest streams of immigration 
that are going to pour into any of the Western world in the 
next two hundred years. There is no other place for hu- 
manity to go. One of the most conservative estimates is that 
of Lord Bryce, who predicts that in two hundred years the 
population will be 375,000,000; while the common estimate 
that it will one day maintain half a billion, or almost one 
third of the world's present population, is not at all difficult 
to accept. 

South America is on the threshold of a future whose 
possibilities cannot be measured. The guarantees of a 
future population and future wealth are here. But here also 
is the certatiny of a materialistic, agnostic civilization, weak 
in moral character and spiritual ideals, unless the saving 
force of a free and full gospel of Christ can be built into the 
life of the continent. 

A Continent In Need 

The appeal of South America to Christian North Amer- 
ica is the same appeal which comes from any land without 
the strong vitalizing influences of a free, living, spiritual 
Christianity. But that appeal is strongly reenforced by two 
considerations. The first is the responsibility which its 
nearness and unity of interests with North America put 
upon us. The second consideration is the timely one of 
the needs of its democracy, the necessity of the varied influ- 
ences of a vital Protestant Christianity if the democracies 
of South America are to be the true homes of freedom and 
justice. 

It is not presumption nor ambition nor a narrow sectar- 
ianism which forces the Protestant Church to regard South 
America as a mission field and a desperately needy one. 
The Eoman Catholic Church has been in South America for 
four hundred years, and the fruits of its stewardship in that 
time, for the most part, constitute an urgent call for a living 



LATIN AMERICA 43 

and free Christianity. Even in case one should question the 
justifiableness of sending missionaries to Eoman Catholic 
South America, there are still the millions of neglected 
people, especially the Indians, for whom the church is doing 
in most cases nothing at all. It fails utterly to occupy vast 
regions. 

But beyond that, South America is not a Roman Cath- 
olic continent in any real sense. The men in the civilized 
and more enlightened centers have practically all left the 
Roman Church and are swinging in a body to unbelief. An- 
other thing which must not be forgotten is that the Roman- 
ism of South America is not the Romanism of the United 
States. In that country it is weighted down with crass mate- 
rialism and dense ignorance ; its moral life is weak and its 
spiritual witness faint. 

"No Plymouth Rook" 

"South America had no Mayflower and no Plymouth 
Rock. ' ' This famous sentence is the key to the condition of 
South America and to much of its history. The Europeans 
who came first to South America were impelled by the spirit 
of adventure, the lust for gold, the desire for conquest. The 
founders of New England were driven by a love for liberty, 
the desire to worship God after the dictates of their own 
conscience. The settlers of North America came from 
those countries of Northwestern Europe where there was 
the greatest freedom. They came to set up new homes. 
The conquerors of South America were militarists from 
the most absolute monarchy in western Europe, and came 
bent on destroying and carrying away all they could get 
their hands on. By giving proper place to this difference 
of purpose and ideals and racial stock we have explained 
much of the divergence between the history of the two 
continents. 

We have seen what are the requirements for a safe and 
free democracy — universal education, a pure and elevated 



44 CHEISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 



home life, moral foundations in character, a strong public 
opinion, and spiritual ideals. We find in South America a 
continent in desperate need of these great pillars of Democ- 
racy. 

Need of Education 

In few nations is illiteracy more pronounced. The 
following percentage of illiteracy will show the appalling 
situation at a glance. In Argentina the percentage of illit- 
erates is 50 per cent; in Uruguay, 50 per cent; in Chile, 65 
per cent ; in Paraguay, 90 per cent ; in Colombia, 80 per cent ; 

and in Brazil, 70 per 



cent. This will mean 
more when we remem- 
ber that for the United 
States the average is 7.3 
per cent. To remedy 
this stigma of illiteracy 
the governments are do- 
ing very little, except in 
the higher branches of 
education. The ele- 
mentary schools are the 
least developed part of 
the educational system. 
It should be remem- 
bered that mixed races, 
such as the white and 
Indian or the white and 
Negro, form 40 per cent 
of the population of the 
continent. The univer- 
sities and higher schools are almost entirely for the intel- 
lectuals or those of pure white blood, of whom there are 
less than fifteen million. There are large and well- 
equipped universities, in cities like Buenos Ayres, under 
state control and a strongly marked leadership of highly 




UNITED STATES 



w//////////////////////mm% 



LITERACY CHART OF SOUTH AMERICA 

The percentage of the population of the different 
countries who can read and write is indicated by the 
diagonal shading. 



LATIN AMEEICA 45 

educated men. The universities are nonreligious and the 
students and professors are almost to a man agnostic or 
openly infidel. 

Moral Ideals 

"We cannot," says Burke, "indict a whole people." 
We cannot overlook the moral idealism which has been 
active in South America or cast any slur on its pure, good 
womanhood. But we cannot overlook the fact that countries 
where from twenty to over sixty per cent of the people are 
of illegitimate birth are lands of desperate moral need. 
From one fifth to one sixth of the population of Brazil are 
of illegitimate birth; in Venezuela it is two thirds; in 
Ecuador, one half; in Chile, one third. Male chastity is al- 
most unknown. Drink has nearly wiped out the Indians. 
Professor Edward A. Eoss says, ' ' The state has entered into 
a kind of partnership with the church; the former to sell 
alcohol to the Indians (having a monopoly of its sale), and 
the latter to provide in her festivals the occasion for its con- 
sumption." 1 Alcoholism is particularly rife on the west 
coast. In Valparaiso, Chile, there is one saloon for every 
twenty-four men. That city, with a population of 180,000, 
had 600 more cases of drunkenness reported in one year 
than all London, with a population of 5,000,000. 

Eeligious Needs 

Back of moral needs is a condition of spiritual destitu- 
tion. The question of the need of Protestantism in all Latin 
America is not a question of church order ; not at all a his- 
torical question whether the Eoman Church has provided 
there a true ministry. It is the inescapable conclusion that 
the old, mediaeval superstitions of the church life that is 
there are inadequate to furnish the moral and spiritual 
leadership needed to bring South America out into the 
liberty of a new national life in the faith of Christ. The 

1 E. A. Ross, South of Panama. 



46 CHEISTIAN CEUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

Bible in South America is an unknown book. The gospel of 
a living Christ is an unknown story. Lord Bryce sums up 
the moral conditions of South America in the last chapter of 
his book in these words : "It is a grave misfortune that both 
the intellectual life and the ethical standards of conduct 
seem to be entirely divorced from religion." At least one 
half of the men of these South American republics have 
broken finally from Rome. The intellectual class has moved 
almost in a body into skepticism and agnosticism. In a re- 
cent Y. M. C. A. canvass only four students out of five thou- 
sand in Buenos Ayres reported any belief in God or faith in 
Christianity. That condition is typical of the universities 
and educated classes everywhere. Robert E. Speer writes, 
"I do not believe that of the one million people in Buenos 
Ayres, there are two hundred men on any given Sunday at 
service." Surely, doubt and denial of all faiths, spreading 
apace and unchecked among eighty millions of people, con- 
cern the entire Christian world. "Churches with modern 
religious scholarship and strong faith are bound to offer in- 
tellectual Latins the torch with which to relight the falling 
or darkened lamps of Christian belief and life. ' ' 

The Centenary Program and South America 

Despite the heroic achievements of a small band of mis- 
sionaries in South America and results of large promise, it 
has been "The Neglected Continent" in Christian missions 
as well as in many other ways. The total number of or- 
dained foreign missionaries in all of South America in 1916 
was only 320. That means one ordained clergyman of the 
evangelical churches for every 156,250 of the population. 
In America the ratio is one to every 622. There are four 
times as many Protestant ordained ministers in the State of 
Ohio as in all of South America. 

The Centenary Program of the Methodist Church plans 
to build, in an adequate way, on the foundations already laid 
to meet its share of responsibility and opportunity. The 



LATIN AMEBICA 47 

estimates do not call for the complete occupation of the fields 
open to Methodism. That would involve staggering 
amounts. But they do provide for a strategic advance 
through the doors that have been opened. The missions in 
South America have made a fine beginning, in which exploits 
of heroism and persistence in the face of great obstacles 
have been done which will rank with the great chapters of 
missionary history. Methodism has to-day 157 missionaries 
and foreign workers, 239 native preachers and workers, and 
152 teachers, a membership of 15,000 and 6,000 unbaptized 
adherents. There are 16 educational institutions and over 
2,500 students. The church is at work in 8 of the republics 
whose total population is 23,000,000. The totals of results 
are not nearly so great as the obstacles and distances, but 
represent a remarkable achievement in the face of all the 
circumstances. 

Establishment of Churches 

As everywhere, the great aims is the establishment 
of a self-supporting, self -propagating native church. The 
method in its essence is that of the successful establishment 
of Christianity anywhere, the proclamation of a " know- 
able ' ' gospel by extensive itinerating. It is the old strategy 
of the pioneer preaching on the frontier in the days of the 
saddlebag, of John Wesley among the coal miners, of the 
apostle Paul in Corinth and Ephesus. There is a marked 
evangelical stir on both the east and west coasts. A wide- 
spread evangelistic movement appears to be approaching in 
South America, and the Centenary Program provides for 
the occupation of new territory and the creation of new 
churches. It calls for such additions to the missionary 
forces as will make possible a continent-wide program of 
church development. This will require 24 missionary 
preachers and 84 national (that is, inhabitants of South 
America) preachers; 86 churches and chapels and 31 par- 
sonages and 4 missionary residences. The financial outlay 



48 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

for the staff and maintenance will be $588,180 ; for property 
about $1,500,000. All the figures of the Centenary survey 
cover a five-year period. 

Education 

In the case of such crying need as the illiteracy of South 
America discloses, educational work is both large, immedi- 
ate service and the pathway to ultimate leadership. To win 
leadership in a non-Christian or belated Christian country 
Christian education must be the very center of the move- 
ment. In the republics where the Methodist Church is at 
work illiteracy averages almost 75 per cent. Unless there is 
developed an extensive system of education the danger ap- 
pears of creating churches of illiterates. The state schools 
are entirely unqualified to produce moral leadership or fur- 
nish gospel ministry. In large areas the state schools do not^ 
even exist. The educational program looks out on the need 
in both directions — the need for primary schools of ele- 
mentary education and higher training schools, universities, 
and colleges in order to rear an educated Christian leader- 
ship with which to stem the tides of infidelity and immoral- 
ity among the educated classes. Bishop Homer C. Stuntz 
says that the battle for the conversion of South America, 
within the next hundred years, will be won or lost in the edu- 
cational institutions that are planted there. To engage in 
this battle with the stake of a continent for Christianity as 
its prize, the Centenary Movement proposes 29 elementary 
schools, 14 high schools, 3 colleges, 1 agricultural school, and 
4 seminary and training schools. The staff required will be 
126 missionary teachers and 158 national (South Amer- 
ican) teachers. The total cost will be about $1,000,000 for 
staff and maintenance and about $2,000,000 for property. 
In the primary schools will be taught elementary industrial 
instruction, hygiene and sanitation, and religion, as well as 
the common elementary branches. The Miethodist Church 
will cooperate with other denominations in a union theolog- 
ical seminary at Montevideo in Uruguay and in two union 



LATIN AMERICA 49 

evangelical universities, one for each coast. In addition to 
this direct service there is now a chance to impress the edu- 
cational movement in South America with the Christian 
point of view, and to give character, tone, motive, and defi- 
nite ends to the educational policies of all the Latin Amer- 
ican republics. 

Along with this program of education there is imme- 
diate need to enlarge the two publishing houses already in 
operation, one on the east and one on the west coast, so 
that they can spread broadcast clean moral and religious 
literature. Much of the general literature now accessible to 
Latin America young people is of a nature so vile that if a 
man were detected in an attempt to bring specimens of it 
into the United States even as personal property, he would 
be arrested and punished. 

Medical 

The number of hospitals of the Methodist Church at the 
present time in the whole of South America is a tragical 
zero. And that in a land where the state hospitals are not 
adequate to care for ten per cent of the people. South 
America has no hospitals, no nurses' training school, nor 
deaconess home under any mission board. Outside of such 
progressive centers as Buenos Ayres, and in countries less 
advanced than Argentina, the neglect of public hygiene is 
appalling. In some sections smallpox is a continuous epi- 
demic. In Chile, where there is one of the finest climates of 
the world, the death rate is twice as high as that of the 
United States. Dr. Speer calls Chile "a killing ground for 
children." Seventy-five per cent of the children die before 
reaching two years of age. Among the neglected and pov- 
erty-stricken millions of Indians the death rate of children is 
even higher than that. 

The present proposal is for the establishment of a hos- 
pital and nurses ' training school in the capital city of five of 
the republics, both as a work of mercy and evangelizing 
force of high value. 



50 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

Panama 

The Republic of Panama has been included in these 
estimates of needs of South America. Panama is a key to 
the world in the new trade map and naval map which the 




PANAMA— THE CROSS ROADS OF THE WORLD 

opening of the canal has made. If the Church of Christ 
should be located " Where cross the crowded ways of life," 
Panama is a good place, for it has become "the crossroads 
of the nations "and will be increasingly so. In two growing 
cosmopolitan cities, Panama and Colon, along what is likely 
to become the greatest commercial highway on the globe, 



LATIN AMEEICA 51 

Methodism is already located and must be strengthened. 
All of Panama, outside the Canal Zone, with 300,000 Indians, 
mostly living in stark paganism with no Christian effort 
directed toward them, has been given to the Methodist 
Church as its sole responsibility, with churches and schools 
to be provided. 

The Cheistian Inteepeetation of the Moneoe Docteine 

The Monroe doctrine, by which we have said to all the 
world for a century, "Keep hands off South America/ ' com- 
mits the United States to a peculiar responsibility for it. 
Not all the interpretations of that doctrine have been looked 
on with favor in South America. The Monroe doctrine is 
often regarded as patronage and as the cover for an undue 
domination of South American affairs and an affront to her 
independence. What is called ' ' the North American peril, ' ' 
the danger of aggression from the United States, has been 
widely heralded and believed. A large step in an interpreta- 
tion of the Monroe doctrine which will replace jealousy and 
suspicion by cooperation is that which Secretary of State 
Lansing gave at the Pan-American Scientific Congress in 
1915 and which met with a hearty support of the South 
American delegates. It is that of a Pan- Americanism which 
rallies around the common standard of the rights of hu- 
manity and the defense of these rights as represented in the 
western hemisphere. 

There is a Christian interpretation of the Monroe doc- 
trine which must supplement all others. It is the responsi- 
bility of the United States to bring to South America the liv- 
ing Christ, who came that all men might have life, and have 
it more abundantly, so that in its own way and under its own 
leadership that great continent may develop the moral and 
spiritual forces strong enough to guide and shape its great 
development. 

New doors are opened. The long battle for religious 
liberty is issuing in victory. Through the heroic efforts of 
Protestant missionaries and often under their leadership, 



52 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

constitutions have been rewritten granting religions liberty 
to eight tenths of the people of South America. Old tethers 
are being worn away. Will the chnrch match the new oppor- 
tunity with new endeavor? 

Mexico 
A Giant Mission-Study Class 

Probably the most remarkable mission-study class ever 
known was that conducted in Mexico during four recent 
years by Victoriano Huerta and Pancho Villa. If the aim 
of a mission-study class is to produce a strong realization 
of a country's need, that class was an unusual success. The 
revolution and anarchy which prevailed, the raids of Villa 's 
bandits across the border, the imminent danger of war and 
the sending of costly military expeditions by the United 
States, all riveted the attention of the nation to the glaring 
fact that there was something desperately wrong in Mexico. 
This violent and effective projection of Mexico into the con- 
sciousness of the United States led to many different con- 
clusions. The voice of the military interventionist was loud 
in the land. With eloquent phrases about the vindication of 
American rights, he pointed to military conquest as the only 
means of quelling the disturbances which are a menace to 
the peace and interests of the United States. When stripped 
of its oratorical trappings, however, this remedy is seen to 
involve an enormous military effort calling for millions of 
men and money, and a long time, with the question of the 
complete subjugation of Mexico doubtful even then. The 
Mexicans as a race are proud and brave. They are bitterly 
resentful of forcible intervention. The vast extent of 
Mexico and the deep mountain fastnesses would make it pos- 
sible for resistance to hold out indefinitely. 

And even if we conquered Mexico, what result would we 
have? We would either have to annex it and admit it as a 
State in the Union or hold it as subject territory in an im- 
perialistic manner. Either alternative is revolting. Fifteen 



LATIN AMERICA 53 

millions of people, 80 per cent of whom are illiterate, unused 
to democratic institutions such as ours, are not ready for 
statehood and cannot conceivably be ready for a generation, 
perhaps for many. The United States is not ready for the 
other alternative — of becoming a conquering, imperialistic 
power. It would be too dangerous to the safety of our demo- 
cratic institutions at home. 

The Only Solution of "The Mexican Pkoblem" 

Even when the attention which the disturbances in 
Mexico drew to the country had no result except the pes- 
simistic and disgusted conclusion that there was "no hope 
for order in Mexico/ ' that result has a high value, for it 
points inevitably to the conclusion that the only salvation of 
democracy in Mexico is not the application of force on the 
outside, but the development of new forces on the inside. 
The United States has realized that its career is indissolu- 
bly bound together with that of its nearest foreign terri- 
tory on the south. The one great result of our mixed prob- 
lems in Mexico is a growing realization that Mexico will be 
a source of ceaseless anxiety and danger to the people of the 
United States until the national thinking and ideals are 
brought to higher levels. Democracy will never be safe in 
Mexico either for that country or the United States until 
the forces which make democracy safe anywhere are brought 
into action and developed — universal education, freedom 
from economic slavery, enlightened public opinion, strong 
moral character, and religious life. The only solution of 
the Mexican problem is the Christian solution, an invasion 
of Christian preachers, teachers, and physicians, the estab- 
lishment of churches, schools, and hospitals that will enable 
Mexico to start realizing her own destiny of strong and en- 
lightened self-government and moral and spiritual progress. 
The United States government in 1917 spent enough money 
in the patrol of the Mexican border on the Pershing expedi- 
tion the first six months to build a college, a hospital, a 



54 CHEISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

church, and a social settlement, all magnificently equipped, 
in every town of over 4,000 people in the republic of Mexico, 
and to provide for their maintenance for ten years. Can 
there be any doubt that the latter expenditure would have 
insured a safe democracy there, as the military expedition 
utterly failed to do ? 

The Needs of Democracy in Mexico 

The strong searchlight of national interest which has 
been swinging across our southern border for five years has 
revealed the glaring handicaps which democracy has in 
Mexico. 

Illiteracy 

Eighty per cent of the population of Mexico is illiterate. 
Schools are few in number, and even in times of peace the 




MEXICO— OUR NEAREST NEIGHBOR 

Names in Roman type indicate stations of the Methodist Episcopal Church; those in Italics, 
centers of the Methodist Church South. This map shows the central and commanding position 
the Methodist Church holds in Mexico. 

government has made little effort to overcome illiteracy. 
Among the large percentage of the population which is the 



LATIN AMEEICA 55 

native aboriginal stock, about forty per cent, education is 
practically unknown. In a condition like this it is clearly 
evident that there can be no intelligent public opinion to 
make possible a stable representative government. 

Slaveby 

A democracy must be free, and over half of the popula- 
tion of Mexico is in a state of debt slavery, or peonage, 
which is little to be distinguished from actual slavery. 
Ninety per cent of the land is held by a small fraction of the 
population. The majority of the population, both of the 
aboriginal inhabitants, the Indians, and the mixed race of 
Spanish and Indian stock, are peons, attached to the great 
estates frequently a million acres in extent. They have no 
land of their own and are kept in ignorance and poverty. 
It is the operation of this system of oppression which makes 
the peons so habitually ready to join a revolutionary enter- 
prise or to become bandits. 

Eeligious Daekness 

Superstition and immorality are interwoven into the 
very religious life of the nation. The religious destitution 
of the Indians is a vivid indication of the spiritual darkness 
of Mexico. For four hundred years since their discovery 
by white men they have been left without the Bible and the 
knowledge of the living Christ. The Eoman Catholic 
Church has not only failed to provide an open Bible and 
the preaching of a spiritual Christianity, but it has been for 
the most part the relentless foe of free thought and speech, 
a free press and free public schools. It has been the agent 
of the rule of oppression and the means of exploitation of 
the people. For these reasons it is losing its hold on think- 
ing people. 

The Pkesent Oppoktunity 

In spite of the revolution and the famine and disease 
and destruction of missionary property, the opportunity for 



56 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

Protestant missionary success in Mexico was never so bright. 
Revolutionary conditions are gone. Organized opposition 
to the present Mexican government has disappeared. Gen- 
uine elections have been held and the government is grad- 
ually coming into a secure position. 

The attitude of the present government toward religion 
as expressed in the new constitution has been interpreted 
as uncompromisingly hostile. The constitution provides for 
a complete separation of church and state. Foreign reli- 
gious leaders, priests and ministers, are not allowed to work 
in the country. But that provision is designed to kill the 
political influence of the Roman Church. It was not in- 
tended to interfere with Protestant religious work, and has 
not in any way interfered with it. Catholicism is in marked 
disfavor with the present government because of Roman 
opposition to the revolutionary party now in power. The 
Protestant missionaries are not allowed to administer the 
sacraments, but they have remained in Mexico and are un- 
hindered in their work of teaching and preaching and pub- 
lishing. The courage and heroism of missionaries in stick- 
ing to their posts in the time of greatest need and danger 
has created an extremely favorable disposition toward 
Protestant Christianity. 

Never was the response to a vital Protestant Christian- 
ity so large in Mexico as to-day. The weakening of the 
power of the priests and the liberalizing influences of the 
revolution on religious thought have furthered a marked re- 
sponse to evangelizing efforts. Never have such crowds at- 
tended Protestant preaching services. In 1917 a great re- 
vival in Mexico City resulted in the professed conversion of 
nearly one thousand people. There is a new eagerness to 
read Christian literature. The sale of Bibles has increased 
over four times in the last few years. In 1917 it was well 
over one hundred thousand. 

Many of the constitutionalist generals and other leaders 
are either Protestants or attendants on Protestant service. 
Mexican Protestant Christians are hopeful and active. The 



LATIN AMERICA 57 

various Mission Boards working in Mexico have taken ad- 
vanced steps in cooperation and union activities. All these 
are unmistakable signs that Mexico is at the threshold of a 
new era in religious development. 

The Centenaby Response 

The Centenary Program of Methodism in Mexico plans 
a response to this enlarged opportunity. It is not a large 
financial outlay that is called for. It is in no way adequate 
to completely meet the responsibility, and yet a program 
that is teeming with possibilities. 

Methodism in Mexico is a "going concern.' ' The revo- 
lution did not stop it. There was only one thing which could 
cause the superintendent of the mission for many years, 
one of the most-loved and trusted men in all the country, 
John Wesley Butler, to leave Mexico. That was the sum- 
mons to another world, which came in March, 1918. Under 
his leadership and helped by his efforts, Methodism has 
grown in Mexico to a total of members and adherents of 
20,000, with 5,000 students in her schools. There is a total 
staff of 21 missionaries, 143 native preachers and workers, 
and 169 teachers. There are 64 churches and chapels. 

Evangelistic 

Methodism has a sole responsibility for three of the fif- 
teen million inhabitants of Mexico. Much damage has been 
inflicted by the disturbances of the revolution. Buildings 
have been plundered and burned. Famine, disease, and un- 
certain conditions have made the work precarious. But 
these losses are more than compensated for by the new re- 
sponse to evangelistic efforts which characterizes conditions 
since the revolution. The largest public congregation in the 
City of Mexico, Protestant or Catholic, meets in the Meth- 
odist church, over a thousand people as a rule, with many 
standing. An extension of direct preaching throughout the 
country will produce large results. The number of evan- 
gelists and pastors and local churches must be increased in 



58 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

order to cover the area allotted to Methodism. Seventy- 
seven additional churches, 4 missionaries and 78 native 
preachers are the efficiency requirements for this need. 

Education 

The Methodist schools in Mexico are few, but influen- 
tial out of all proportion to their size and numbers. They 
have been a large means of disarming prejudice and gain- 
ing the good will of the people. With proper expansion they 
will be an increasing influence. The appalling illiteracy, the 
absence of all moral and religious education in the govern- 
ment schools, make an irresistible appeal for Christian edu- 
cation. The Centenary Program calls for a minimum of 66 
schools, 102 native teachers, the strengthening of the exist- 
ing secondary schools and cooperation with other denomina- 
tions in two great union educational enterprises, a central 
Christian university, and a union theological seminary in 
Mexico City. 

Medical 

The conditions of war have increased the need for med- 
ical help, a need that was already large. Abounding filth 
and avoidable disease spread throughout the country. Only 
in the large cities are there state hospitals and physicians, 
and these are almost entirely for the wealthy. The one hos- 
pital and dispensary which the church has, serves exclusively 
an area of two hundred and fifty by four hundred miles con- 
taining a million people. It is a center of healing and sani- 
tation and social betterment. It must be strengthened and 
medical work expanded. 

The Rise of a National. Church 

A day of large promise for the development of a vigor- 
ous Protestant Christian Church of Mexico is here. Some 
idea of the vitality of the Mexican Methodist Church may be 
gained from the fact that of the $200,000 a year asked for 
five years for the* expansion of the work of the church in 



LATIN AMERICA 59 

Mexico, over one third of the amount is to be raised in Mex- 
ico itself! Mexicans are taking new responsibilities of 
leadership and support. It is not the Americanization of 
Mexico to which we are called, but to a task better than that. 
It is to supply in these shaping years the fertilizing forces 
of the gospel by which a strong Mexican church and nation 
may rise. The urgent call, in the words of Bishop F. J. Mc- 
Connell, is to "take the Lord Jesus Christ to Mexico to let 
him work out his own plans for the Mexican people." 



The Chinese Question is the world question of the twentieth cen- 
tury. — B. L. Putnam Weale. 

The crucifixion was two hundred and eighty years old before Chris- 
tianity won toleration in the Roman empire. It was one hundred and 
twenty-eight years after Luther's defiance before the permanence of the 
Protestant Reformation was assured. After the discovery of the New 
World one hundred and fifteen years elapsed before the first English 
colony was planted here. No one who saw the beginning of these great, 
slow, historic movements could grasp their full import or witness their 
culmination. But nowadays world processes are telescoped and history 
is made at aviation speed. The exciting part of the transformation of 
China will take place in our time. In forty years there will be tele- 
phones and moving picture shows and appendicitis and sanitation and 
baseball nines and bachelor maids in every one of the thirteen hundred 
districts of the empire. The renaissance of a quarter of the human 
family is occurring before our eyes, and we have only to sit in the parquet 
and watch the stage. — Edward A. Boss, The Changing Chinese. 



CHAPTER m 

CHINA— THE OPEN DOOR TO FOUR HUNDRED 
MILLION MINDS 

Communication Tkenches 

A kecent picture in the illustrated weekly papers of a 
group of several hundred Chinese laborers digging com- 
munication trenches behind the Allied lines in France is a 
vivid symbol of the position of China in the world to-day. 
Two forces of vast significance are symbolized in that pic- 
ture: the fact that the ancient autocracy of China is lined 
up with the forces of democracy in the great conflict; and 
also that that great people, from one fourth to one fifth of 
the human race, which for ages has built around itself a solid 
wall of exclusiveness, is to-day building communication 
trenches out to all the world. The war has extended and 
quickened the transformation of China, a process already 
going on at express speed, and a movement of unsurpassed 
importance in modern history. 

The Awakening Giant 

To try to picture the transformation which China is 
undergoing puts a hard strain on the dictionary. Writers 
on China in the past fifteen years have ransacked the dic- 
tionary for all the words that look like the Whirlpool Rapids 
below Niagara Falls and have pressed them into service. 
We have had in rapid succession China in Convulsion, the 
Conflict of Color, The Changing Chinese, The New Day in 
China, The Uplift, The Awakening, The Emergency, The 
Revolution, China Inside Out, and China Upside Down. It 
takes a whole conspiracy of picturesque words to express 

63 



64 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

what is going on. It is a political revolution, a moral ad- 
vance, an intellectual renaissance, a religions reformation, 
and a nineteenth century of scientific and industrial develop- 
ment all combined. 

More than a century ago that far seeing genius, Na- 
poleon, said of China, the memorable and oft-quoted words : 
1 ' Yonder is a sleeping giant. Do not wake him. ' ' But there 
are more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in 
Napoleon's philosophy. The giant has been awakened, 
startled bolt upright, by forces in which Napoleon little 
reckoned; by another giant which in Napoleon's day was ly- 
ing asleep in the teakettle— steam ; by the long-distance flash 
of the electric wire ; and last, but by no means least, by the 
inspiration of the long-distance reach of the gospel of Jesus 
Christ. 

The awakening in China, part of the great transforma- 
tion which is making a new era through Asia, can be fitly 
compared only to the Renaissance in Europe in the fifteenth 
century which was the transition from the Middle Age to the 
Modern — a "new birth' ' to a new and larger life through 
the revival of learning. Men look back to those days, the 
"spacious days" of discovery, of political and religious 
reformation, of the birth of modern science, as one of the 
greatest creative epochs in history. Yet the new awakening 
now going on in the Far East, and notably to-day in China, 
surpasses in extent, in rapidity of development, and perhaps 
even in significance, that which took form in Europe in the 
fifteenth century. 

As we look more closely at this many-sided revolution 
in China, three large aspects of it press upon our attention. 
These aspects have been visible for many years, but are 
brought to our minds with a sharpened intensity because of 
the war and its results. The first consideration is that of the 
vastness of the awakening. The second is that of the tremen- 
dous importance to the world of what China becomes. The 
third is the solemn one of the fleeting character of the Chris- 
tian opportunity. 



CHINA 



65 



The Vastness of China's Awakening 

Any vivid sense of the scale of the changes already 
accomplished and now going on in China must have for its 




CHINA 

Strategic centers in the Methodist occupation of China. Chart at the right shows the de- 
velopment of membership and self-support of Methodism in China. 



background a conception of the size and extent of China. A 
population of nearly four hundred millions of people, set in 
one of the most productive areas in the world, one half as 



66 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

large as the United States, including Alaska ; with coal and 
iron resources as rich as those of any land on earth ; a labor- 
ing class by far the largest and toughest, the most industri- 
ous and economical to be found on the globe — surely here is 
the stage and here are the actors for one of the greatest 
dramas of history. 

This background of the mass of China has far more 
meaning, however, when we add to it the fact that since the 
outbreak against foreigners in the Boxer Revolution in 1901, 
there has developed in seventeen years, a reversal of national 
feeling, an openness to Western influence, such as can hardly 
be matched in all history. The land where once all life had 
crystallized into unchangeable molds has suddenly become 
fluid, plastic, seeking new molds from the Western world. 

The Political Revolution 

The political revolution which in 1911 overthrew the 
Manchu dynasty and made China a republic astounded the 
world, and the world has not yet recovered from its amaze- 
ment. Those who knew China at all had little idea that the 
course of democracy would run smooth. The six years of 
the republic have not been smooth ones. The democratic 
idea is still crude. The great essentials of a safe and sound 
democracy are lacking and must be supplied. The struggle 
for democracy is still on. Nevertheless, the failure of the 
monarchist movement under Yuan Shih Kai and the collapse 
of the attempt of Chang Hsun to restore the Manchu em- 
peror has shown that the heart of China is unmistakably at- 
tached to democracy and to the republic. 

A new emphasis to this new political day in China has 
been given by the response of the republic to the invitation 
of the United States to associate herself with the stand taken 
against the piratical submarine warfare of Germany, Feb- 
ruary 9, 1917. In her affirmative response a far-reaching 
foreign policy was inaugurated and China undoubtedly won 
for herself a new place in the world's esteem. In that re- 



CHINA 67 

sponse and in the subsequent declaration of war on the 
Central Powers, August 14, 1917, "for the first time since 
treaty relations with the powers had been established, 
Chinese diplomatic action had swung beyond the walls of 
Peking and embraced the world within its scope. ' ' * 

The New Patriotism 

Along with the political revolution, both as cause and 
effect of it, there is in China a national spirit of patriotism, 
absent ten years ago, but to-day a growing and even a flam- 
ing force. A new self-consciousness of national weakness 
and humiliation over it have generated a nationalism the 
like of which China has never known before. There is an 
ardent resolve that the old, weak China must give way to a 
new, strong China, made solid instead of loosely bound to- 
gether, armed instead of defenseless, self-supporting instead 
of dependent. The action which is resulting from this new 
nationalistic feeling runs along three main lines : the provi- 
sion of an army and navy so that China may be able to re- 
sist foreign aggression; the development of native indus- 
tries ; and the movement for universal education. It will be 
readily seen that this new patriotism contains both large 
promise and peril to Christian influence. It affords a 
splendid new foundation in national feeling on which Chris- 
tianity may build, but it also holds the possibility, that un- 
less the church can so increase its effort during these 
years of opportunity and make itself Chinese in leadership 
and thought, the new patriotism may turn to the native 
faiths as being Chinese, and Christianity may be struggling 
under the odium of being foreign. 

The Moral Eeformation 

Perhaps the most astounding feature of China's awak- 
ing is the moral advance, strikingly illustrated by the war on 

1 B. L. Putnam- Weale, The Fight for the Republic in China, p. 319. 



68 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

opium begun in the edict of the Empress Dowager in 1906. 
Thirty years ago the majority of the people in Europe and 
America would have as soon thought of gravitation being 
abolished as of opium-smoking being abolished by China. 
E. A. Ross calls the warfare on opium which China con- 
ducted for ten years "the most extensive warfare on a vi- 
cious private habit that the world has ever known." l It 
sprang from a sense that unless the people speedily re- 
nounced the vice that was undermining its manhood, there 
was no hope for China among the nations. It should be re- 
membered that it was the great memorial signed by thir- 
teen hundred and thirty-three missionaries from seven coun- 
tries which drew forth the famous edict abolishing the opium 
trade, much of the edict being the very language of the me- 
morial. The enforcement of the edict against opium was 
carried out strictly and strenuously. Blood was shed and 
millions of dollars • worth of property destroyed. Vol- 
untary Anti-opium Leagues were formed which entered into 
the fight in many places with the fervor of a religious cru- 
sade. The fight on the habit has had unexpected success, due 
to the rising spirit of patriotism which came to its aid. The 
production of opium in China has been cut down seventy or 
eighty per cent and in the process a new force in China is 
being nourished — public opinion. Millions for the first time 
in their lives have thought, "What is the public good?" 
The war on opium is only one phase of the awakening. 
Other moral delinquencies such as the social evil and official 
dishonesty have been dragged forth from their intrenched 
positions and pilloried. 

Educational Awakening 

The educational awakening in China is the real key to 
its future. It must be examined in more detail later in the 
chapter, but its place is central in even the most rapid im- 



1 The Changing Chinese, p. 146. 



CHINA 69 

pression of the vastness of the "new birth" of the nation. 
With the awakening to the need of universal education as 
the only real preparedness for China's future, and the sub- 
stitution of modern education for the ancient system in use 
for two thousand years, China has embarked on the most 
stupendous educational task ever attempted. It involves the 
provision of a million schools to furnish instruction for the 
children of school age. Only two per cent of the children are 
now being educated. Temples are being confiscated in many 
cities to accommodate schools and colleges. The number of 
modern government students in Peking in the decade from 
1905 to 1915 rose from 300 to 17,000, and the pupils in the 
province surrounding from 2,000 to 200,000. 1 The new sys- 
tem when completed will call for nearly a million teachers. 
No one with a living imagination can fail to be deeply moved 
by the spectacle of this great people setting itself to the gi- 
gantic task by acquiring a knowledge by which it alone can 
hope to play in the world's affairs a part commensurate with 
its natural strength. 

The Religious Shifting 

Deep as these changes go, there is one that goes deeper. 
It is the moving away from old religious foundations and 
the search for new ones. The religious situation in China 
is an enlargement by four hundred million diameters of 
that picture which has touched the heart of the world, 
"Breaking Home Ties." A great people, more numerous 
than all of Europe, with the exception of Russia, is faring 
forth from its ancestral home of beliefs to find a power 
which its old faiths have failed to supply. Through all 
classes, government officials and scholars and the illiterate 
masses, there is an openness to Christianity. In the classic 
declaration of the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference 
in 1910, truer to-day than then — ' * One quarter of the human 



^ddy, The New Era in Asia, p. 15. 



70 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

race is slipping from its spiritual moorings. Surely, never 
was richer freight derelict on the waters of time." 

Impoktance to the World of What China Becomes 

Swiftly and providentially we are being led out of the 
laundryman stage in our thinking of China. It is idle to 
dream of a peace for the world and a democracy safe for the 
world unless in these formative years the moving mass of 
China settles firmly on the political, moral, and spiritual 
foundations which alone can support a true democracy. 
The population of China doubles itself in about eighty 
years ; that of the rest of the world in about a century. It 
is probable that by the year 2000 it will be close to eight 
hundred million. With a similar growth in Japan, Malay- 
sia, and India this means that the yellow races in a century 
or two will rapidly approach the white race in numbers. It 
is not "yellow journalists" or "jingos" who foresee that 
unless this inevitable growth in numbers and power is ac- 
companied by a moral and spiritual transformation on the 
inside of China and a truly Christian and unselfish states- 
manship on the part of the powers dealing with her, we may 
witness a race war in comparison with which the present 
conflict will prove only a skirmish. 1 It is of vast importance 
to the world what conceptions of life command the alle- 
giance and what principles govern the conduct of the multi- 
tudes of China. There is a real yellow peril in the East, not 
the bugaboo of a war with Japan with which conscienceless 
"jingos" struggle vainly to start strife, but the possibility 
that the new age in China as well as Japan may end in mate- 
rialism. Should China successfully reorganize herself, and 
become an independent industrialized state, given to militar- 
ism, factories, foreign trade, and to all the allurements of 
an age which has lost its head in the mad rush for wealth 
which modern inventions have made possible, she may 
become a great materialistic power and her weight be 



1 See Bashford, China: An Interpretation, p. 457. 



CHINA 71 

thrown into the scale against the forces making for moral 
progress and nobler ideals in life, to the infinite loss and 
danger of the world. 

The Fleeting Christian Opportunity 

The Christian Chnrch has in China an opportunity 
boundless in every respect except that of time. China will 
not always be in her present transition. The forces which 
make for the present popularity of Christianity will spend 
themselves by a natural process. China sits to-day at the 
feet of the West in school. But schooldays will pass, in that 
sense, and the young giant will go out from the schoolroom 
door, his industrial and political lessons learned. The 
prominence of the Christian missionary as a pioneer of 
Western culture will some time have an end. Government 
schools will equal, and possibly surpass, missionary schools. 
Will Christianity in this generation so redeem the time that 
when China has learned of the West its arts, its sciences, its 
industry, it shall also have received its best gift, its faith, 
and a virile and expanding Chinese Christianity have come 
into being adequate for the titanic task of shaping the new 
nation? "A new China is impossible without renewed 
Chinese. ' ' 

The Eesponse of Methodism 

In the Centenary Program for China the Methodist 
Episcopal Church has planned a thoroughgoing and stra- 
tegic response to this divine opportunity. It is a program 
not based on a guess, nor on vague hopes. It is based on a 
careful survey, the product of the years of study, of the 
actual needs in men and money covering a five-year period 
for putting the present work on an efficient basis for the 
Christianizing of the eighty millions of people for whom 
the church is exclusively responsible. The program rests 
on seventy years of encouraging history and experience. 
In 1847 the first missionaries ' of the Methodist Church 



72 CHEISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

landed in Foochow. After ten years of intensive labor the 
first converts, thirteen adults, were baptized. In sixty years 
that small company has grown to a Chinese church of 65,900 
members, 7,309 unbaptized adherents, and a strong native 
leadership of 3,000 preachers. The church won a place of 
educational leadership with 21,000 students in 600 primary 
schools, 12 secondary schools, and 5 universities. Its 11 hos- 
pitals and 2 dispensaries, though understaffed and almost 
without nurses, have performed miracles of healing and 
opened doors more impregnable than the great wall of the 
northern kingdom. 

The call for advance is along these three lines of provi- 
dential success. The estimates express the call to Christian 
America to help make democracy safe for China ; to see our 
struggle to admit the world to democracy clear "through 
to the finish' ' and to help rear in China those pillars without 
which any democracy must crash to the ground — education, 
moral character, and religious ideals. China has wakened 
up, it is true. But " it is one thing to wake up. It is another 
thing to get up." China will never ' t get up ' ' until that gos- 
pel, which is not in word but in power, comes to its strug- 
gling democracy and bids it with a divine potency, "In the 
name of Jesus of Nazareth, rise up and walk ! ' ' 

Let us look at this Centenary Program for China in 
education, in that broad proclamation of a rounded gospel 
which may be called evangelism, and in medical work: 

China's Need foe Education 

"The fight for the republic in China" will be in the 
schoolroom. A safe democracy in a nation where illiteracy 
averages 95 per cent of the population as it does in China, 
and where only two per cent of the children are in school is 
unthinkable. It is unthinkable to the leaders in China them- 
selves, and the government, seeing the utter hopelessness of 
a strong China without widespread education, has inaugu- 
rated a movement for education without parallel, 



CHINA 



73 



The key to the Christian opportunity in China is to be 
found in the old ruined examination halls in Peking and 
other capitals of provinces, where examinations under the 




M CHINA'S ONLY HOPE " 

Strategic Christian Educational Centers. Union Universities are located at Peking, Foochow, 
Nanking, and Chengtu. Each of these universities is fed by secondary schools in outlying districts. 



ancient system of education were held. Over thousands of 
these halls reeds and vines are growing. Since the edict of 
1905 abolishing the old system of education and substitut- 
ing modern methods of instruction these halls are crumbling 
into dust. And "with them has crumbled, not only a kind of 
examination but an attitude toward life, a system of values, 



74 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

a standard of character. The passing of China's old edu- 
cation is the transformation of her life. Now the student 
who would win governmental positions must answer ques- 
tions in European history, in economics, in social science; 
and the old Chinese officials, with their huge goggles, their 
embroidered coats, their clinging to the far past, have gone 
into hiding, never to emerge." 1 

These crumbling halls are the symbol of present Chris- 
tianity in China, not only in that they witness to- the eager 
open-mindedness of China, but also because they witness to 
the age-long veneration of the scholar in China. China is 
literally a nation of scholar worshipers. Hence for Chris- 
tianity to win the educated classes through its colleges will 
give it an ascendency over the masses to a degree not to be 
matched in any other land. And when we add to that the 
fact that the educated classes, the literati, are approachable 
to a measure unknown fifteen, or even ten, years ago, the 
opportunity of a strategic Christian victory through educa- 
tional leadership is a large one. 

Democracy's Need of Christian Education 

China's need for Christian education is, in biblical lan- 
guage, "much every way." We have seen that the only 
hope of her democratic experiment is in education. The 
government is powerless both to provide all she needs and 
the kind she needs. Not for a hundred years to come can 
the government in China care for the education of its own 
children. Even if it were to gather into schools as large a 
percentage of the population as attends school in Japan, it 
would need to provide buildings and teachers for forty mil- 
lions of pupils. 

The fertilizing truth of the gospel brought democracy 
to China, and Christianity must see it through. A half cen- 
tury or more of silent and ceaseless publication of the reli- 



W. H. P. Faunce, Social Aspects of Foreign Missions, p. 73. 



CHINA 75 

gious and economic truths of the gospel in a very real way 
laid the mine whose explosion the world saw when the 
Manchus were driven out. In the words of the President 
of China, Li Yuan Hung, ' ' China would not be aroused to- 
day as it is were it not for the missionaries.' ' A large num- 
ber of the leaders of the new republic were educated in mis- 
sion schools. But the testing of that democracy has only be- 
gun. Christian education must furnish the leaders needed, 
unselfish, true leaders. A live and intelligent public opinion 
has begun to be created, but it needs nurture and the devel- 
opment of conscience in the individual. Patriotism, newly 
born, must be stimulated and purged of selfishness. 

Industrial. Education 

Democracy cannot survive unless it is solvent. China 
must be self-supporting if she is to be free. She needs tech- 
nical education in order to develop her abundant national re- 
sources, raise the standards of living, and wipe out her curse 
of poverty. It is part of the task of Christianity to provide 
training in scientific agriculture, forestry, and technical 
branches of all kinds so that China may be able to throw 
sure economic foundations under her democracy. 

Moral and Eeligious Foundation of Character 

Here is the real problem of education for democracy, 
the formation of character, It is a problem before which 
China, resting only on her ancient faiths, is helpless. Con- 
fucianism has furnished a great moral restraint to the peo- 
ple of China in its high ethical teaching, but the religions of 
China have proved utterly inadequate to save the people by 
producing sustained and progressive moral character. The 
widespread corruption of officials, of the new as well as of 
the old, is to-day one of the chief obstacles to progress in 
China. It is an obstacle which will never be solved without 
a new moral and religious dynamic. There has come a 



76 CHEISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

strong recognition by thoughtful Chinese that without some 
power which can create and strengthen character there is 
little hope of their dreams for their country being realized. 
As Yuan Shih Kai confessed to John R. Mott, ' ' Confucian- 
ism has ethical ideals but lacks the power to make them 
effective.' ' It cannot block natural inclinations and wrest 
lives from the grip of appetite and passion without the doc- 
trine of responsibility to God. More than that, with the 
breakdown of Confucianism and the swing away from the 
moral influence it had, on the part of the educated classes, 
the most important question China must answer is, "Whence 
shall come the morality of to-morrow so deeply needed I" 
Christianity must help her find the only sufficient answer. 

The Favoring Conditions for Christian Education 

The Methodist Centenary Program for education in 
China comes at a time when conditions have made a su- 
premely favorable opportunity. 

A Welcome to Christian Schools 

China offers a welcome to Christian education such as 
is met with in no other non-Christian nation. Communities 
everywhere are calling and frequently in vain for Christian 
schools. The Chinese are ready to make liberal subscrip- 
tions for land and buildings. The missionary school has a 
wide prestige from the fact the missionary has aggressively 
pioneered many reform movements. Missionary schools 
were the first modern schools and are still the best. The 
missionary introduced Western medicine. He has intro- 
duced new trees and crops ; has been prominent in famine re- 
lief and in other ways has been the pioneer of Western cul- 
ture. All this has brought to Christian education an en- 
thusiastic welcome. The return by the United States to 
China of $50,000,000 after the Boxer indemnity was paid, 
and its use by China for educating leaders in the United 



CHINA 77 

States, has won for the American missionary school in 
China an increased regard. 

Open-Mindedness of Educated Classes 

The receptiveness of the literati, or educated classes, is 
one of the outstanding features of the changed attitude of 
China. In 1896 John E. Mott called the literati of China 
"the Gibraltar of the non-Christian student world.' ' A 
leading missionary to China stated that he would have felt 
well repaid if he could have been the means of the conver- 
sion of one of these officials or literati in his lifetime. 1 A 
striking evidence of this new approachability was furnished 
by the meetings for the educated classes conducted by Dr. 
John E. Mott and Sherwood Eddy in 1914 and by Mr. Eddy 
in 1915. In every center visited the largest halls available 
were filled with audiences drawn from the educated classes. 
The government and educational authorities in many cases 
gave their cordial support. Public buildings were given for 
the meetings and holidays declared in colleges in order that 
students might attend. In 1915 in twelve cities 121,000 of 
these officials, literati, and business men attended these evan- 
gelistic meetings, 12,000 of them signed Bible study pledges, 
and 7,000 are actually enrolled in Bible classes and making 
a sincere study of Christianity. 

Influence of Graduates 

Christians occupy a place of influence in the new China 
out of all proportion to their numbers. Many of the lead- 
ers of the reform party at Nanking, Peking and in the prov- 
inces, including Sun Yat Sen, are products of mission 
schools. Two thirds of China's first constitutional congress 
were graduates of mission schools. These fruits of Chris- 
tian education have vastly increased the favorable disposi- 
tion of the new China toward the missionary schools and 



1 Eddy, The New Era in Asia, p. 115. 



78 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOE DEMOCEACY 

colleges. It should not escape our notice, in passing, what 
a remarkable tribute this prominence of mission school 
graduates is to the efficiency of education as a force for 
Christian influence. 

The Centenary Educational Program 

primary and secondary schools 

The Methodist Church is exclusively responsible for 
16,000,000 boys and girls of school age — a part of China's 
60,000,000 children who never receive a day's schooling. 
Methodism, according to Bishop Bashford, who has spent 
fourteen years in China, could plant primary schools for a 
million pupils this year, in her own territory, if the teachers 
and means could be provided. Schools of all grades are 
crowded to the doors and hundreds of applicants are turned 
away annually. The survey of efficiency requirements for 
China calls for 328 primary schools, with enough missionary 
and native teachers to direct them. These primary schools 
are needed for a twofold purpose, as feeders to the higher 
schools and for creating universal literacy in the church. 
At present from one half to two thirds of the converts are 
illiterate. The same aims determine the need of secondary 
schools. The advance program calls for 21 secondary 
schools, designed especially for securing an educated mem- 
bership. The aim is to fit students for life as well as prepare 
them for higher schools; and agriculture, chicken-raising, 
weaving, silk culture, and mechanical training are taught. 

UNIVERSITIES 

Methodism has located, by a wise statesmanship, uni- 
versities in five strategic centers, with a system of tributary 
schools around each. In Peking, Chengtu, Nanking, and 
Foochow Methodism cooperates in union university centers. 
Nanchang is to be the denominational university center in 
the unmeasurably rich province of Kiangsi. This states- 
manlike cooperation in educational work in China is one of 



CHINA 79 

the finest fruits of Christianity on the mission field. It has 
added to the efficiency and prestige of Christianity and holds 
large promise for the future. At Peking the church is united 
with other missions, building on what was the former Meth- 
odist campus, a university in the national capital, the radiat- 
ing center of political life. There young men trained in a 
Christian university are put in the very center of the na- 
tion's life. At Foochow, the center of the largest Methodist 
constituency of China, the church is cooperating in another 
Union University with six denominations. At Nanking is 
located the third Union University. It is the ancient cap- 
ital and the center of the political and educational life of the 
lower Yangtze valley. Four other denominations cooperate 
with the Methodist Church. At Chengtu, the center of West 
China, is the West China Union University, a triumph of 
church federation, with seven denominations cooperating. 
A few years ago large plans were made for this university 
involving sixty buildings to be erected on the campus. To- 
day thirty of these buildings are either erected or are pro- 
vided for. 

The magnitude of this university task may be estimated 
from the fact that there are 1,000,000 teachers to be trained 
for China's 60,000,000 illiterate children. The high strat- 
egy of it may be seen in the fact that 80 per cent of students 
desiring education above high school must come to mission- 
ary institutions. The Christian Church is thus educating 
the men who in five to ten years will give direction to the 
government system of education. One of the largest fields 
of influence for these universities is that they set up stand- 
ards of education which may become models for the gov- 
ernment school system which is at the present time taking 
definite shape. 

To put this educational undertaking on an efficient basis 
calls for 65 missionary teachers and 973 native teachers. 
For property and equipment, there will be needed in the next 
five years, in addition to present income, $1,879,007; for 
maintenance, $1,131,978; and for endowment, $1,806,667, 



80 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOE DEMOCRACY 

making a total of $4,817,652. Plainly, this is a small price 
to pay for buying up an opportunity that will never come 
again. 

The Evangelistic Pkogram 

"What therefore God hath joined together, let not man 
put asunder." Education and the direct proclamation of 
the gospel are parts of one Christian task in every land. In 
the evangelistic program are grouped the direct work of the 
church in preaching and social service. The call for advance 
is based on a thrilling history of evangelistic success and a 
marvelous opportunity. Three thousand native preachers 
and a membership and adherents totaling 75,000 make up 
a native church of genuine strength. The temper of the 
church may be seen in the 100 per cent increase of self-sup- 
port in ten years. The Centenary surveys for China call for 
a 300 per cent increase in giving on the field by the native 
church. 

The Methodist Church is exclusively responsible for 
eighty millions of people, a number four-fifths as large as 
the population of the United States. Every fact advanced 
about China in this chapter is an argument that this is the 
time of times to give to the native church of China a mo- 
mentum that will insure it a destiny of leadership. The 
loosened grip of ancient faiths on China, the receptivity of 
all classes, high and low, and the stirring of the national 
mind outlined above, make an opportunity for Christian 
evangelism hardly to be matched by any since the conversion 
of the peoples of northern Europe. 

The Centenary World Program plans the development 
of self-supporting and self -propagating churches until they 
are found everywhere. At present there are hundreds of 
thousands of villages and towns left to Methodism alone 
which are still without any regular Christian services. It 
will make possible a commanding work among educated 
classes in city centers, including the erection of worthy 
church buildings which will command the respect of both 



CHINA 81 

Christian and non-Christian and the securing of strategic 
sites while property is still cheap. It is planned to provide 
and equip Chinese pastors qualified to lead the influential 
classes and to hold for Christian life and service the pro- 
ducts of mission institutions. 

With great wisdom the evangelistic program calls for 
social service on a broad scale. There is both statesmanship 
and love in it. Social service is a direct application of the 
gospel and also a means of largest appeal to the Chinese. 
For the social message of Christianity is strikingly in accord 
with the best of Chinese tradition. 

When the missionary emphasizes medical work, famine 
relief, public health, and help for the unfortunate, he meets 
a hearty response in China, for the Confucian thought which 
has so controlled China through the ages has stressed hu- 
manitarian work. 

To carry through this program there will be needed 33 
new missionaries and 474 native workers. In property and 
equipment it calls for 9 institutional churches, 314 city and 
village churches and many missionary and native workers' 
residences ; an outlay over four years of about $1,500,000. 

The Floweeing of a Centuey Plant 

The church must do no less. The present readiness of 
China is the divine flowering of a century plant, for the year 
1919 is the one hundredth anniversary of the translation of 
the Bible into Chinese by Eobert Morrison, the first Protes- 
tant missionary. It was a tremendous task. Little wonder 
that after the task was done, Milne, Morrison's associate, 
cried out, ' ' To learn Chinese is a work for men with bodies 
of brass, lungs of steel, heads of oak, hands of spring steel, 
eyes of eagles, hearts of apostles, memories of angels, and 
lives of Methuselah." That date of the translation of the 
Bible into Chinese is one of the great red-letter days in the 
history of China. Now that century plant is bursting in a 
gorgeous bloom. In the five years after the revolution there 



82 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOB DEMOCRACY 

has been an increase in membership in the Christian Church 
in China of 25 per cent ! 

Western influence is breaking down superstition in 
China. Shall we put nothing else in its place? The science 
and learning and commerce and the vices of Western civili- 
zation are sweeping in pellmell. Shall we send nothing 
along to supplement and redeem? If we cast out the evil 
demon of superstition only to have the seven devils of com- 
mercialism, agnosticism, sensuality, and materialism take 
up their abode, surely the last state of China will be worse 
than the first. We play the part of destroyers if we break 
idols only to leave vacant shrines. China needs those idols 
replaced by a deeper reverence, a more satisfying faith, a 
nobler moral ideal. "We who have sent through all the 
Eastern lands our food products, our textiles, our automo- 
biles, shall we also send our Bible? We who are breaking 
down family life and ancient forms of worship and long- 
established government, shall we also plant the faith in God 
the Father and in Jesus Christ ?" x 

The Medical Task 

A physician in the United States, hurrying to the house 
of a patient recently, was met by a friend who inquired 
where he was going. On being told the name of the patient 
the friend reassured him by saying the patient had a book 
on "What to Do Before the Doctor Comes.' ' "That is why 
I am hurrying," the physician replied. "I am afraid he 
will use it. ' ' 

That has been the climax of China's physical suffer- 
ing. She has been using her native text-book of old wives' 
fables in medicine to meet the great scourges with which 
the land is afflicted and has not only been powerless before 
them but even added to their toll of suffering and death. It 
has been like the fatal sickness of George Washington. 
The disease was bad enough, but he was making a brave 

X W. H. P. Faunce, Social Aspects of Foreign Missions, p. 97. 



CHINA 



83 



struggle against it, when the doctor arrived with his stern 
cure which proved too much even for the iron constitution 
of the "Father of his Country." Chinese medicine, al- 




METHODIST HOSPITAL CENTERS IN CHINA 
The figures represent the number of persons for whom Methodism is responsible 

though possessing some value, is quite incapable of dealing 
with such diseases as diphtheria, cholera, and plague. The 
Chinese know practically nothing of surgery except as they 
learn it from Western schools. Only in certain centers have 
people awakened to questions of public sanitation ; cities the 



84 CHEISTIAN CEUSADE FOE DEMOCEACY 

size of Boston draw water from polluted rivers and wells. 
Every city and village has open sewers. Out of ten chil- 
dren born in the United States three, normally the weakest 
three, will fail to grow up. Out of ten children born in 
China, these weakest three and probably five more besides 
will die. The present death rate in China is from 50 to 55 
per 1,000. In the State of New York it is 15 per 1,000; in 
modernized Japan, 20 per 1,000. In North America there 
is one doctor to every 625 people; in China one to every 
2,500,000. 

Methodism in China has 11 hospitals, 2 dispensaries, 
and 16 physicians. They have performed a service vastly out 
of proportion to their numbers. Native women physicians 
at the head of Methodist hospitals, such as Dr. Mary Stone 
and Dr. Ida Kahn, graduates of American medical schools, 
and brilliant physicians and surgeons, are among the bright- 
est trophies ever won by Christian missions in any land at 
any time. At Dr. Mary Stone's Hospital in 1915, 10,000 new 
patients were treated, 13,000 return visits and 1,000 patients 
cared for in the hospital, making a total in round numbers 
of 25,000 persons reached by Dr. Stone's work. In the 
survey of needs the responsibility of Methodism has been 
figured out carefully on the basis of figures submitted by 
physicians in charge of hospitals on the fields. At Peking 
the measure of responsibility for the Methodist hospital is 
14,000,000 people. In Chengtu in West China it is 2,500,- 
000. For that need there is one doctor. Thirty-five million 
people for whom the church is responsible have 11 hospitals 
and 24 physicians ! One of the saddest facts is that 40 per 
cent of the Methodist hospitals in China are closed, because 
there is no staff to care for them. Most of the hospitals are 
manned with one physician and when he leaves, for illness, 
or any cause, there is no one to take his place. 

There is imperative need for equipping existing hos- 
pitals with sufficient nurses, physicians, and surgeons. On 
the lowest estimate 25 missionary doctors, and 101 native 
doctors and assistants are needed. Two new hospitals and 



CHINA 85 

13 dispensaries must be provided. The total asking for 
this medical work is $1,087,345. This much must be invested 
to meet the church's share in the great cooperative medical 
work in which it is engaged, and which the China Medical 
Board is aiding in a broad-visioned, generous way. 

The Peize 

These are days of revolution and somersault. Deeper 
than that they are days of grace. For there has appeared 
to the sober, conservative, and restrained minds of Chris- 
tian leaders at the heart of the whirlpool the real possibility 
that if the Church of Christ will open its eyes and see and act 
swiftly and grandly, the next generation will find China a 
Christian republic. 



It is the time of times to do something that reminds people that 
we believe our religion. Things that are impossible with men have ever 
been the most attractive things for Christ. — John B. Mott. 

England possessed a superb architect of genius, Sir Christopher 
Wren. He prepared a magnificent design for rebuilding the city of 
London which he would have made the noblest and most magnificent city 
in the world. The central idea was Saint Paul's Cathedral, and Wren 
meant it to be approached by a stately colonnade leading up from what 
is now Ludgate Hill. All the rest of the city was to be grouped around. 
The king and Parliament accepted the plans, but it was a melancholy 
fact that the scheme was thrust aside by the haste of the commercial 
interest to begin rebuilding, and by the unwillingness of the citizens to 
cooperate for the common good. The supreme moment was lost. Sel- 
fishness rose and spoiled the picture. The old London, with its narrow- 
ness, its crookedness, its inconvenience, remained as it will be with us to 
the end. Shall the new world after the war perpetuate the crookedness, 
the narrowness of the world before the war ? — W. BlacJcshaw. 

Never can the church say to any young missionary, "Young man, sit 
down!" when the country is calling its young soldiers to enlist. Never 
can the church be content to become parochial when the mind of the 
country is becoming international. When the thoughts of all living men 
are widened by the process of the suns, then is the very time to widen 
the endeavor of the Christian Church. — W. H. P. Faunce. 



CHAPTER IV 
A WORLD PROGRAM 

The Methodist Episcopal Church has gotten her dates 
mixed in a divine confusion. Coming to the one hundredth 
anniversary of the beginning of Methodist missions in 1819, 
she is planning to celebrate, not the first hundred years, but 
the next hundred. Forgetting the things which are behind, 
not unmindful of their sublimities, but stirred by their obli- 
gations, she has set her face like a flint to rear as a centen- 
nial observance the only monument worthy of those who 
have gone out to the world with Christ's message and of the 
Christ who led them. That monument is to be a world-wide 
foundation for Christ's kingdom. 

Two things there are in the heritage of Methodism 
which commit the church irrevocably to a new and deter- 
mined pressing of her world warfare. 

The Obligation of Histoey 

The providential success of the first century of Meth- 
odist missions lays upon the church the high obligation of 
building worthily on that noble foundation. In no other con- 
nection is the paradox more true that "We must be greater 
than our fathers in order to be equal to them. ' ' The begin- 
ning' of the first hundred years of Methodist missions saw 
one man, a Negro, John Stewart, at work among the Wyan- 
dot Indians in Ohio. Not an inspiring figure, surely, and 
yet, making his way through the tangled forests, he was the 
trail-blazer of a world-movement. The first missionary to a 
foreign land soon followed in his train, Melville Cox — whose 

89 



90 CHEISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

frail body soon burned itself out with fever, but whose grave 
in the African sands has made one spot of that great con- 
tinent forever American, from which he still calls in his dy- 
ing exhortation, "Let a thousand fall, before Africa be 
given up ! ' ' 

The close of the century sees the church set full in the 
stream of modern life, building the evangel of Christ into 
the life of thirty-four countries. It is raising a vigorous 
native church, which is itself carrying the propaganda of 
the Kingdom in the Far East, in Africa, in India, and South 
America. The Board of Foreign Missions has 1,071 mis- 
sionaries and 9,107 native workers. The Woman's Foreign 
Missionary Society has 500 missionaries and 4,003 native 
workers. The total staff, therefore, is 14,680, of whom about 
nine out of every ten are native workers. The vitality of 
the native church in mission lands may be fairly judged by 
the fact that for every three dollars contributed by the Home 
Base, about one dollar is collected on the field. When we re- 
member that most of these fields are lands of dire poverty, 
the showing is remarkable. On the foreign field there are 
442,765 members, 2,516 churches and chapels, 106 high 
schools and colleges, 36 theological and biblical schools, 
2,853 primary and other schools, and 49 hospitals. With 
such a legacy of providential leading and apostolic success 
as this, dare anyone counsel retreat? Dare we do anything 
but "thank God and take courage' ' for a larger and more 
enthusiastic effort? 

The Obligation of Democratic Ideals 

In a day of democratic striving the world over, a 
church born of democratic ideals, a force for social progress 
in its very birth hour, and during all its history a church of 
the common people, cannot escape the responsibility of 
world-service for democracy. In the democratic awakening 
in England in the eighteenth century the Methodist revival 
under Wesley played a vital part. The English historian 



A WOELD PEOGEAM 91 

Lecky reckons 1 the Methodist revival as one of the greatest 
forces for social progress in the century. "The democracy 
of the Methodist Movement, ' ' in the words of a recent his- 
torian, "was founded upon the eternal possibility before 
every man. ' ' The religious revival preceded and made pos- 
sible in large degree the steady march of democratic pro- 
gress in England which went on for a hundred years, secur- 
ing the extension of the right to vote, the protection of 
workers in factories, and child labor laws. And now that the 
democratic struggle is being fought out on a world scale, 
Methodism must answer the call for service and leadership 
in that struggle for which her birthright and experience 
have so splendidly fitted her. 

A Vision of Wokld Need 

In the chapters of this book we have lifted up our 
eyes to the fields to whose emancipation our church is 
pledged. We have scanned the horizon of China, India, 
Japan, and Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines, Africa, 
Europe, and Latin America. We have seen men of different 
colors, but every color takes on a darker hue from the 
shadow of Christless night in which the peoples sit. We 
have listened to a Babel of languages, but the language of 
human need is one. It is a weary world, needing many 
things, but needing nothing so desperately as it needs Christ. 
We have gone in imagination through wide-open doors, and 
yet the figure of a door is too passive and mechanical. It 
is not so much a world of open doors that stretches out be- 
fore us as a world of imploring hands. It is a darkened 
world, where over one half the human race cannot read or 
write a word of any language ; a suffering world where one 
half the human race is without a knowledge of medicine, 
surgery, hygiene, or sanitation. 

It is a receptive world. H. G. Wells is a true seer when 
he reports: "All mankind is seeking God. There is not a 
nation nor a city in the globe where men are not being urged 



92 CHEISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

at this moment by the Spirit of God in them toward the dis- 
covery of God. ' ' x 

For this hour, the Centenary World Program of Meth- 
odism is the organized strategy of the love of Christ. It 
must stir the church as the voice of God. 



The Church's Need of a Wokld Ckusade 

We have thought of this program as one for the salva- 
tion of the world, and so it is. But let us not deceive our- 
selves into thinking that that is all. It is a necessary under- 
taking for the salvation of the church. The hour has struck 
when the Christian Church must get on with the business of 
establishing the kingdom of God by an aggressive warfare 
in deadly earnest if she is to hold the allegiance of men. In 
her total task she has what the world so direly needs, "The 
moral equivalent of war ' ' ; and only as she utilizes all her 
resources for that one tremendous objective can she lead a 
world which has become accustomed to a war footing. 
There is no other idea large enough to serve "as a moral 
equivalent to war" than the adventure of applying Chris- 
tianity to a desperately needy world. All the "war vir- 
tues," farsighted planning, quick initiative, unselfish cour- 
age, disciplined leadership, obedience, esprit de corps and 
effective cooperation, may find permanent and satisfying 
place in the crusade of the kingdom of God. The task to 
which the church calls men must be large and daring enough 
to make room for these virtues, else it will not appear worth 
while. For the war has taught us what we had almost for- 
gotten — that a great response can always be brought out by 
a great appeal. The capacity for heroism in the average 
man and woman when confronted by a really big demand has 
been almost a revelation. Merely dabbling with its task will 
rally no army to the standard of the church. The church 



1 H. G. Wells, God the Invisible King. 



A WORLD PROGRAM 93 

must be saved by her faith, a militant and aggressive faith in 
the world-kingdom of God, to which she dedicates her all. • 

The Christian Spirit of Adventure 

A program of world-evangelization and uplift such as 
Methodism has before her will recover what is essential in 
Christianity and what has possessed the strongest appeal 
to men since the days of Christ, the spirit of adventure. The 
church is an institution, of course, but Christianity is more 
than that. It is an adventure, an enterprise, a crusade. "It 
was intended for the arena ; it is helmed and girded for the 
quick encounter, it sends out its knights and men-at-arms to 
battle. ' ' x The moral and spiritual authority which we crave 
for Christ's church, the power to command the enthusiasm 
and service of men will be hers when she flings herself into 
and holds before them a great positive offensive movement. 
Mr. Clutton-Brock, in words that bite, has described the 
source of much of the weakness of organized Christianity. 

" Christianity, ' ' he says, "has lost its power of coher- 
ence, its joy, its power of laughter, because it has been 
merely on the defensive. There we stand, entrenched in our 
carefully fortified lines which cover the narrow territory we 
are holding on to, without the strategic initiative that goes 
with victory.' ' 2 "We are afraid — so many of us — to take 
risks and make history, afraid to think imperially in the 
cause of the Kingdom of God, afraid of all the reconstruc- 
tion and enterprise that must go with war. We rely upon 
apology, and dreading the disasters which might follow 
frontal attacks upon deeply entrenched evils, we strafe them 
from a distance with long-range fire. Timid and divided 
counsels, which would bring certain failure on the Somme or 
at Arras, first limit and then wreck our scheme for progress 
and reform. We have grown contented, or are only feebly 



1 P. B. MacNutt, The Church in the Furnace, p. 17. 

2 A. Clutton-Brock, The Ultimate Faith. 



94 CHEISTIAN CBUSADE FOE DEMOCRACY 

discontented, with our limitations, and year after year we 
settle down to our trenches for another winter. ' ' 1 

Only one course is large enough for the emergency- — 
to do boldly what Jesus did, put the Kingdom and the Cross 
in the very center of our message and life. And the Cross in 
terms of modern life means getting under the world's need 
and burden with a force strong enough to lift it. 

The Favoring Conditions To-day for the World Program 

The unfavorable conditions are far more easily seen 
perhaps. The great preoccupation — the war — with its long 
train of financial and other calls which must be swiftly and 
fully met, makes the task larger and harder in many ways, 
But one who enters deeply into the temper of the times can- 
not fail to feel that there are great and new forces at work 
in our national life which make it a day of unprecedented 
opportunity for initiating a wide and sacrificial missionary 
undertaking which has a truly great challenge and promise. 

A Day or Large Things 

It is a day of large things. The leadership of the world 
is thinking and acting in larger terms than ever before. The 
scale on which resources are being mobilized in the countries 
at war, the new standards of thinking in military circles, in 
scientific realms, in the financial world, all present a tre- 
mendous challenge to forsake the old standards forever and 
to lift the program of the Kingdom into new terms greater 
and more expansive than those of all other organizations. 
In our first year of war the United States gave to humani- 
tarian and Christian objects for which great campaigns 
were conducted, $330,000,000. In no previous year had 
there ever been given to corresponding objects more than 
$30,000,000. The Bed Cross in its first campaign asked for 
$100,000,000. It received $120,000,000. The Y. M. C. A. 
asked for $35,000,000 in November, 1917; it received over 

1 P. B. MacNutt, The Church in the Furnace. 



A WORLD PROGRAM 95 

$50,000,000. People are accustomed to thinking in large 
dimensions ; old standards of measuring and thinking have 
been abandoned. In addition to that, while Christian peo- 
ple in the United States are in the war whole-heartedly to see 
it through to final victory, there is an increasing longing for 
something constructive rather than merely destructive, that 
builds rather than batters down. And in the words of 
Bishop Bashford, "The Centenary World Program is the 
most constructive and statesmanlike project before the 
world to-day." 

A Day Favoeable to Ameeican Woeld-Influeetce 

When President Wilson delivered his message to Con- 
gress at its assembling, December 4, 1917, the telegraph 
lines and cables of the whole world were connected up and 
held in readiness, so that his words might be flashed to every 
corner of the earth without the loss of an unnecessary 
second. That network of wires running out to the waiting 
millions of the earth is a symbol of the new position of 
America to-day. President Wilson has become the enthusi- 
astically accepted spokesman for the Allied nations. In the 
words of Stephane Lauzanne, editor Le Matin, Paris, 
"President Wilson's addresses are the gospel of the Allied 
cause. In his message of April 2, as well as in those that fol- 
lowed it, the Allies found the echo of their own sentiments, 
of their own will, their own hopes, strengthened in volume 
by distance." 1 From England Frederic Harrison writes: 
1 ' The American President has put the whole case of the war 
into unanswerable words. The material and moral forces 
of the Old World seem to be passing over to the New World. 
Mr. Wilson is now the most powerful ruler the world has 
seen for at least one hundred years.' ' 2 

Never was there throughout the world so favorable a 
predisposition for whatever moral and spiritual leadership 
America may give. The embarking of the United States in 

1 New York Times, March 10, 1918. 

a The Fortnightly Review, February, 1918. 



96 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

an unselfish war for the rights of mankind — a war in which 
it has nothing to gain save the privilege of establishing the 
victory of simple faith, humanity, and justice — is a unique 
spectacle in history. The nation's rally to that war has 
brought a new glory to Old Glory — the brightest that has 
ever shone on its folds. The flag has become the revered 
symbol of the consecration of a great people to an unselfish 
world task of liberation. "We have no selfish ends to serve. 
We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indem- 
nities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacri- 
fices we shall freely make. We are but one of the cham- 
pions of the rights of mankind. ' ' 1 Up to May 15, 1918, the 
United States had advanced to the Allied nations $5,763,- 
850,000, and the total will increase every month. 

What does this new position of the United States mean 
in terms of spiritual opportunity? Simply that God has 
placed before, us a pathway to world-spiritual influence such 
as has never before been opened to a people. To fail to use 
it in a large way would be an unthinkable blunder. 

A New Sacrificial Temper 

A new sacrificial temper is abroad which is transform- 
ing the national life. Idealism has waxed strong in adver- 
sity. Multitudes who had hitherto lived selfish lives have 
learned the joy of helping to bear the burdens of others. 
We see it supremely in the thousands of men who have 
freely offered themselves to meet hardship, pain, and death 
for the nation's life. 

"Blow, bugles, blow. They brought us, for our dearth, 
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love and Pain. 
Honor has come back, as a King, to earth 

And paid his subjects with a royal wage ; 
And nobleness walks in our common ways again ; 
And we have come into our heritage." 2 



1 President Wilson's War Message, April 2, 1917. 

2 Rupert Brooke, "The Dead." Published by John Lane Co. From Col- 
lected Poems of Rupert Brooke. 



A WORLD PROGRAM 97 

"The call of national necessity, the splendid comrade- 
ship of service on behalf of all that makes life moral and 
spiritual and lifts it above a godless chaos that is ruled by 
brute force, the high romance of giving self away for the 
more-than-self which is the background of all idealism and 
religion, the breaking in upon smooth, easy living of a sud- 
den demand for sacrifice — these things have been a trumpet 
blast to the soul of the people during these past three 
years. Men who once appeared to be absorbed in trivial- 
ities have ridden off into the unknown with a great glory at 
heart that none can take away, and heroism which seemed 
to have vanished from the earth has looked at us again out 
of quiet, shining eyes, splendidly unconscious of anything 
but that it is fine and yet quite natural to venture all at the 
call of duty. "We have seen the smaller interests of the state 
merged in the great flood of patriotism, and the partisan loy- 
alties of political life, while not abolished, yet certainly sub- 
ordinated to the higher demands of national service. Al- 
most everywhere we have heard a new spirit of self-devotion 
confessing the obligation to give one 's share, however small, 
to the whole effort of the nation. How different it has all 
been from the deadly inertia of the past!" * 

That spirit is abroad in the land from coast to coast. 
Women have eagerly sought new forms of service and 
leaped forward to undertake responsibilities hitherto borne 
by men. Human society has never seemed more worth 
saving than it does now ; nor were the hearts of men ever 
more prepared for a great adventure. 

Surely, it is God's time to place before the newly dis- 
covered and released capacities in the manhood and wo- 
manhood of America for sacrifice, leadership, and devotion, 
the Christian crusade for the worlds true freedom, as the 
completion of conflict in which they are now engaged. It is 
a time to show them that there is a battle line that extends 
not merely from the English Channel to the Mediterranean, 



*F. B. MacNutt, The Church in the Furnace, p. 18. 



98 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

but which stretches out against the strongholds of night and 
evil around the world ; and a battle which never ceases and 
in whose warfare the highest and most heroic qualities of 
men are demanded. These new gains of the spirit in the 
men and women of America in these days will make the re- 
sponse to so great a cause sure and emphatic. 

The Voice of Missionary History 

That such a hope has solid foundations, the voice of 
history amply testifies. Strange as it may seem to the super- 
ficial glance, war time has always been the birthday of mis- 
sionary advance. There is a vital relation between the for- 
eign missionary enterprise and the widening of men's hor- 
izon through sacrifice and struggle. It was during the War 
of 1812 that foreign missions in America began and Judson 
sailed for India. ' ' The church did not wait for the success 
of our navy, but sent out its missionaries because moved in 
some measure by the same impulse that sent forth our ship 
— by a determination to assert human freedom for America 
and for all the world.' ' * The record of our own Civil War 
days is eloquent. Seldom has a people passed through a 
more exhausting crisis, and it might well be supposed that 
foreign missionary societies would languish. But that was 
the very period when new ones were founded. All the wo- 
men's missionary organizations were founded either during 
or at the close of the war. The dark and critical years of 
1863 and 1864 witnessed a remarkable rally of the Christian 
people of North America to maintain their missionary enter- 
prises. The supporters of the American Board increased 
their givings by $61,000 in 1863 and by $122,000 in 1864. 2 
From 1852 to 1862 the average income of the Methodist 
Episcopal Church for home and foreign missions was under 
$260,000; in 1864 there came a further increase of $150,000, 
and in 1865 a still further increase of $83,000, bringing the 



1 W. H. P. Faunce, The New Horizon of Church and State, p. 36. 
2 J. H. Oldham, The World and the Gospel, p. 62. 



A WORLD PROGRAM 99 

total contribution in that year to more than $618,000. The 
same is true in larger measure of our own time. The Lon- 
don Missionary Society last year cleared off a large in- 
debtedness and carried forward its work without diminu- 
tion. The Missionary Society of the Wesleyan Church in 
England, in the third year of the war, received the largest 
income that it has ever received in its entire history. The 
Methodist Church in Canada received a larger income than 
it had ever had in any year of peace. 

These records prove that the support available for mis- 
sionary work is to be measured not by the material wealth 
of a people, but by the spirit which animates them. They 
well illustrate the truth strikingly expressed by John R. 
Mott : ' ' The history of the world and all Christianity shows 
that periods of suffering have for some reason always been 
great creative moments with God. ' ' 

A Day of World Horizons 

The United States since 1914, and more completely 
since her entry into the war, has been forced to think in 
world terms. The horizon of the mind of the average citizen 
has been pushed back till it touches the ends of the earth. 
The map of the world has been really studied for the first 
time by a hundred million people. More than that, millions 
have become acutely conscious for the first time since they 
trudged away to school with a big geography under their 
arm, that there was such a thing as a map of the world. 
Geography has suddenly leaped out of the character of a 
text-book for the grammar grades into that of a gripping 
romance. To the average man a few years ago Bagdad was 
in the Arabian Nights — nowhere else. Jerusalem had its 
sole existence in the Bible. He could not tell whether 
Ukraine was a river or a breakfast food, and, more than 
that, he did not care. Multitudes of Americans have lived 
almost as remote from European problems as the Pequot 
Indians before the Pilgrims landed. But now the great con- 



100 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

flagration in Europe has lighted up the four corners of the 
globe. What comes into our dinner table depends on what 
happens in Russia and the number of ships in South Amer- 
ican ports. The map of the world is replacing the map of 
the township and the township mind is bursting its bonds. 

Physical contacts have helped to widen the horizon. 
The gathering of millions of men in our own country into 
great cantonments has been an incalculable educational and 
social force in the removal of provincialism and mind-suffo- 
cating prejudice. Letters home from Americans over the 
sea, in contact with new countries and new races, have 
pushed out the walls of a million homes until a large part of 
the world begins to be visible from the sitting room window. 
The recent beautiful words of a Canadian soldier throw a 
vivid light on the process of thought which is going on all 
over North America : 

"If where an Englishman is buried on a foreign soil is 
called 'a little bit of England,' then we may call the Ypres 
salient a mighty bit of Canada. If anyone were to inquire 
what is the most important city of Canada, we might answer 
unhesitatingly, ' The city of Ypres. ' The hosts of our young 
men who have fallen in battles round that city have hallowed 
the name for all Canadian hearts, and rendered the place 
ours in the deepest sense. Montreal, and Halifax, and Van- 
couver are among our lesser cities, but Ypres, where so 
many of our brave are buried, shall remain for us the city 
of our everlasting possessions.' ' * 

This process has made more easy the task of spiritual- 
izing this gigantic lesson in geography. That is just what 
the missionary undertaking is — spiritual geography. When 
a man has learned to pronounce Ypres and Prezmysl (if any 
such exist) and Mesopotamia, there is a greater chance that 
he will be able to pronounce Chengtu and Benares and Sin- 
gapore and realize that they are not merely dots on the map 
in some forgotten text-book, but seething centers of life 



1 Arthur H. Chute, North American Review, March, 1918, p. 227. 



A WORLD PROGRAM 101 

which have a vital relation to him. The spots on the map 
mnst be put on our conscience, and there never was a more 
favorable atmosphere in which this transfer may be made 
than now. "When the thoughts of men are widened by the 
process of the suns, then is the time to widen the endeavor 
of the Christian Church. ' ' 

The Wokld at Our Dinner Table 

It is when we sit down at our dinner table, however, that 
the new horizon becomes most evident. America in her food 
conservation campaign has been keeping a world boarding 
house, and the process has high spiritual values. New 
boards have been put in the table to lengthen it out so that 
our Allies and the hungry peoples of the earth may sit down 
with us, and strange faces gather at every meal. The food- 
saving regulations are in effect a knock at the door at the 
beginning of every meal and the government saying to us, 
"Move along a little closer at the table. Here are six 
French orphans who must dine with you to-day.' ' And 
when in a thin, weak voice they ask, "Please pass the 
sugar," we pass it, even though we have only one spoonful, 
or none at all, for our coffee. At the next meal it is four 
hearty English soldiers whom we are feeding by our saving. 
They have been doing hard work and need meat and wheat, 
and we pass it to them, keeping the bran muffins for our- 
selves. Multitudes are rising up at these demands and 
throwing open the door to these hungry guests and crying, 
"In the name of God, welcome !" The United States is 
making an experiment in organized sacrifice. The forces 
born out of a demand for food as a universal need are gen- 
erating new values in society which may be effective in turn- 
ing the scale to victory. They will be effective for a longer 
task than that too, for they are the fundamental virtues 
necessary to the extension of the kingdom of God. It is in- 
conceivable that after having had the world at our table for 
years, reminded at every meal of the world fellowship of 



102 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

need, France's need and Belgium's, Poland's and Ar- 
menia's, as well as our own, we can ever again sit down 
in the little dining room as it was before, and shut the world 
from our thought. America has already appeared in a new 
role among the nations as the Wheat Bringer, and the expe- 
rience is preparing her in a real way for the larger task to 
which she must come — that of spreading the Bread of Life 
before the world and bidding the lame, the halt, the blind of 
the East and West to sit down at the great democratic feast 
of God. 

Accomplishing the Task 

the discoveby of god 

The discovery of a world — a world so needy as ours — 
is a terrible thing unless there goes with if something else, 
the discovery of God. That is the center of the Centenary 
undertaking — a new discovery of God. It is not money pri- 
marily. Money will not be given without the Spirit of God 
to prompt it ; nor can it be used fruitfully without the Spirit 
of God to direct. The new world-consciousness must be 
matched by a new God-consciousness. It is a vast foreign 
missionary program and is paralleled by one equally great 
for home missions. In the face of such a task, without God 
we can do nothing. That is the chief glory of the task. The 
tragedy of a little task is that frequently a man or a group of 
men can accomplish it and there it ends. The glory of a big 
task is that men are utterly unable to accomplish it and are 
thrown back on God in utter dependence. That brings them 
into contact with the only power sufficient for getting God's 
work done in the world — the fullness of God himself. It is 
futile for us to find again the world-horizon of Christ if we 
do not find also the vantage point from which he scanned it, 
that of an empowering fellowship with God. The whole 
Centenary task of which every other aspect is an expression 
is to increase the spiritual energy of the church by the full- 
ness of spiritual life. It was that release of power which 
was always in Paul's mind when he thought of the church 



A WORLD PROGRAM 103 

— "The church which is his body, the fullness of Him that 
fillethallinall. ,, 

THE KESPONSE OF THE INDIVIDUAL 

With the far horizon of Christ must go the immediate 
focus of his call on the individual. It is not "the church' ' 
which can do this task; it is no mythical "they" who can do 
it. It is we who must do it. It is I who must do it. Christ 
lifted up his eyes afar and beheld the fields white unto har- 
vest; but he also always looked squarely into the eyes of the 
individual he spoke to, and flung his great imperatives, 
Come, Be, Do, and Go, into the heart of the man before him. 
The evangelization of the whole world demands the whole 
church. 

This truth of the dependence of victory upon every 
man has been greatly sharpened by the war. If the war has 
resulted in the discovery of the world as one, it has made 
another discovery equally great at the other end of the scale 
— the discovery of the common man. It is not too much to 
say that among the many things which distinguish this war 
from all others, one is the emergence of the common man. 
The strongest weapon in the hands of either side is the 
capacity to starve. Victory depends on the capacity and 
willingness of the whole people to suffer and sacrifice. It is 
fought by the individual in every walk of life rather than 
generals and leaders and governments. ' * The war is being 
fought to-day by all the nations in the most solid formation 
imaginable — men, women, and children all roped together 
after the fashion of the Ancient Cimbri when going into 
battle." 1 

A Militant Faith 

Christ's warfare in the world is a people's warfare. If 
the Centenary Program is to mean a successful epoch in that 
victory, it will be only through the service and sacrifice of 
every disciple. 

* Simeon Strunsky, Yale Review, October, 1917. 



104 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

It means that the militant conceptions of our faith which 
run all through the New Testament shall achieve a new 
dominion over our lives. "The army," says the first of the 
regulations and orders for the British army, "is composed 
of those who have undertaken a definite liability for serv- 
ices/ ' So is the church. That liability must be recognized 
by more than the comparatively few. ■ * Christ also loved the 
church, and gave himself for it ; . . . that he might pre- 
sent it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or 
wrinkle, or any such thing." Christ's church must not be 
a church in which men enlist for a lifelong warfare, and then 
pass into a permanent reserve which is never called up for 
active service. Its bases must not be thronged with those 
who wear its uniform but refuse to go up into the line. The 
call of the hour is for the resources of the whole church, 
multiplied by a new energizing of God, to be lined up to the 
whole task of the Kingdom. 

A NEW REALITY IN RELIGION 

A new reality in our religion must be our primary pre- 
paration to meet the day. We cannot be 

"Light half -believers in our casual creeds 
Who never deeply felt or clearly willed," 

and be what our own time demands of us as followers of 
Christ. The only method of growth that the kingdom of 
Christ has ever known has been by the overflow of an 
abounding life. And as it was in the beginning it is now 
and ever shall be. To nourish and sustain that new reality 
of faith, the Centenary Movement calls for a new practice 
of prayer. To express that reality it calls for a new practice 
of stewardship. 

PRAYER 

The call is for a world-fellowship of intercession 
throughout the church. It will mean for many entirely new 
adventures in prayer, and prayer is an adventure — the most 



A WOELD PBOGBAM 105 

rewarding and the most enabling adventure in life. Prayer 
is not saying religious words with our eyes shut and a ter- 
minal "Amen" attached. It is a venturing forth of the 
soul like the voyage of Columbus across a great unchartered 
deep. And as the evidence that it really finds the Father 
that it seeks, it brings back the marvelous treasure of a 
changed life and a reenf orced might for service. We read in 
the Gospels that when Jesus looked out over the whitened 
fields ready for harvest, the first thing he said was, 
"Pray." His order must be ours. "It is in agonizing in- 
tercession that the real conflict in our time is to be won. 
Eivers of vitality have their rise in souls that are on their 
knees. The deep and mighty prayers of the church are the 
birth pangs of the race. ' ' * 

STEWARDSHIP 

Stewardship is organized devotion. It must be a stew- 
ardship of life — holding our personality and all its powers 
as a trust. For many it will mean a dedication of life to spe- 
cific service. The church needs eighteen hundred new men 
every year to keep her pulpits adequately manned. The 
Board of Foreign Missions has declared the need of five 
hundred new missionaries every year to carry out the Cen- 
tenary Program; and the Home Board requires no less. It 
is a call for the strong, daring leaders. ' ' Send forth the best 
ye breed" is the world's asking. 

It must be a stewardship of money — a definitely 
planned and scanned allotment of a sacrificial proportion 
of money regularly given to God. We must bear in our 
ledger, in our cash book, ' ' the marks of the Lord Jesus. ' ' 

The Available Besources 

The Methodist Episcopal Church is easily able to make 
the offering required to meet the financial asking of the total 
world Program of Foreign and Home Missions. The budget 

1 J. H. Jowett, The Churcji in Time of War, p. 122. 



106 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

of forty million dollars in five years for foreign missions 
would require an average weekly offering of only four and 
one half cents per member! The present combined offering 
of churches and Sunday schools is an average of less than 
half a cent a week per member ! The total of eighty millions 
of dollars for both Home and Foreign Mission program can 
be raised by an average gift of nine cents per member each 
week. Surely this is not a staggering amount! The chief 
difficulty to be overcome is that at present the total offering 
for all benevolences comes from a small per cent of the mem- 
bership. 

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the 
earth.' ' God is still creating. The loom of Providence is 
moving swiftly. It took one hundred years of missionary 
effort to win the first million converts to Protestant Chris- 
tianity. It took twelve to win the second. It took six to win 
the third. In the melting and reshaping world to-day the 
movement of the Kingdom is accelerated. Never was the 
creative hand of God more clearly visible than in this hour. 
What more glorious destiny could there be for anyone than 
to become in deed and truth a fellow worker, a fellow creator 
of the new world he is shaping ? 

"Only have vision and bold enterprise, 
No task too great for men of unsealed eyes. 
The future stands with outstretched hands ; 
Press on and claim its high supremacies." 



QUESTIONS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION 
CHAPTER I 

1. How would you answer the contention that the war 
has shown the failure of Christianity? 

2. Do you believe that war can be destroyed by in- 
crease of education, science, commerce, or law? Give rea- 
sons for your answer. 

3. Do you think that Christian principles, if they were 
allowed free action, could prevent war ? What principles ? 

4. In what ways do Christian missions make for 
peace ? Can you give any examples ? 

5. In what ways has the war shown the unity and in- 
terdependence of the world ? 

6. What effects of the war in changing conditions of 
life here in the United States have come under your obser- 
vation? 

7. How would you define ' ' democracy ' ' ? Why do you 
consider it worth fighting for ? 

8. What teachings of Jesus have been effective in pro- 
moting democracy ? Why have they been so ? 

9. What is the difference between autocracy and de- 
mocracy? Which is the nearer to Christian principles? 
Why? 

10. What different institutions or forces have made 
democracy and freedom permanent in the United States ? 

11. What are the imperfections of democracy in the 
United States ? How may they be corrected? 

12. What is the effect of a democracy in a country 
where people are not ready for it? 

13. What does a nation need in order to be fitted for 
democracy? 

14. How does Christianity supply those needs ? 

15. What is meant by a "plastic" condition in the life 

107 



108 CHEISTIAN CEUSADE FOE DEMOCEACY 

of a nation? What evidences are there in different coun- 
tries of such conditions now? 

16. Why is there a better opportunity for the extension 
of Christianity now than a generation from now? 

17. In what way would you show that missions are a 
completion of the nation's task in the war? 



CHAPTEE II 

Latin America 

1. What difference in ideals and purposes was there 
between the early settlers of North and South America? 
What effect did these differences have on the development 
of the two continents ? 

2. What reasons are there for expecting an immense 
immigration to South America in this century? 

3. What are the reasons for the comparative neglect 
of South America by the United States. 

4. What are the causes of the present new interest? In 
what ways has that interest been expressed? 

5. What has been the effect of the large illiteracy on 
the democracy of South America ? 

6. What would you say to the contention that South 
America is a Eoman Catholic continent and Protestants 
ought to keep out of it? 

7. What are some of the characteristics of Eoman 
Catholicism in South America? How does it differ from 
the Catholic Church as we know it in the United States ? 

8. What are the reasons for the prevalence of agnosti- 
cism in South America ? 

9. Why does the United States have a peculiar respon- 
sibility for the welfare of South America? 

10. How can it best meet that responsibility? 

11. What conditions seem to you to promise most suc- 
cess to Christian missions in South America now? 

12. Mexico is one of the richest lands in the world, 



QUESTIONS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION 109 

probably the very richest in the world in proportion to its 
population. Why are the majority of the people so poor? 

13. What do you consider the good results of the Mex- 
ican revolution? 

14. Why is it a matter of intense importance to the 
United States what Mexico becomes f 

15. How does Mexico stand in reference to the neces- 
sary conditions of a safe democracy discussed in Chapter I? 

16. What are the hopeful conditions for the develop- 
ment of a strong Protestant Christianity in Mexico ? 

17. How would the Centenary Program of Methodism 
for Latin America affect the prospects of democracy there ? 



CHAPTER III 

China 

1. How would you compare the probability of winning 
China to Christianity to the probability of the early church's 
winning the Roman empire ? Which do you think the harder 
task? Why do you think so? * 

2. Compare the Renaissance, or Revival of Learning, 
in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages with the awaken- 
ing in China. 

3. What were the causes of the revolution by which 
China became a republic? What part had Christian mis- 
sions in it? 

4. Why does the fact that China is a republic increase 
the obligation at this time to strengthen the Christian 
Church there? 

5. In what necessities of a strong and safe democracy 
is China weak or lacking entirely? 

6. How does the Centenary Program of Methodism 
aim to strengthen these deficiences ? 

7. Why is the opportunity for the Christianization of 
China one that will not wait for a long period of years? 
What elements in the present opportunity are transient? 

8. What advantages of popularity do missionaries en- 



110 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 

joy to-day in China? What are the reasons for it? Will it 
always be so ? 

9. Why is the new feeling of patriotism an advantage 
to Christianity? How may it possibly become an obstacle? 

10. What will be the future character of China if it 
does not become a Christian nation? What effect would 
such a result have on the peace and moral progress of the 
world? 

11. What are some of the evil effects which contact 
with Western civilization has had on China ? 

12. Which do you regard as the harder task — the abo- 
lition of opium in China or the prohibition of liquor in the 
United States? 

13. What reasons are there favorable to the influence 
of the United States in educational and spiritual influence 
in China? 

14. What features of China's history make educa- 
tion of supreme importance? 

15. What main lines of service are planned in the Cen- 
tenary Program for China? ■ Which one would you prefer 
to engage in? 

16. What are the particular possibilities of influence in 
the five university centers involved in the Centenary Pro- 
gram? 

17. If China's faith in her old religions is destroyed 
and Christianity is not put in their place, will she be as 
well off as before ? 

18. What are the reasons why many people believe 
China may be made a Christian nation within a century? 



CHAPTER IV 

1. What are some of the results of the first century of 
Methodist missions? How has this effort in foreign lands 
affected the growth and life of the church at home ? 

2. Why was the Methodist Revival in England under 
the leadership of John Wesley and Whitefield and others an 



QUESTIONS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION 111 

influence in bettering social conditions and securing greater 
political freedom? 

3. What is meant by "a moral equivalent for war"? 
In what ways can the missionary enterprise of Christianity 
appeal to the same virtues which are developed by war? 
Why has it not done so more in the past? 

4. What do you think are the principal obstacles in the 
way of making possible an advanced missionary program 
at the present time ? 

5. What are the characteristics of this time which are 
favorable to an increased interest in aggressive foreign 
missions ? 

6. What would you say to a man who argues, "We 
ought not to think of or plan for anything except the war"? 

7. What would you say to a man who says, "I give all 
my contributions to the Eed Cross ; I haven't a cent for mis- 
sions"? 

8. What evidences can you give out of personal expe- 
rience of the increase of men's knowledge and interest in 
the rest of the world due to the war? How much geog- 
raphy have you learned from the war ? 

9. How do you explain the fact that war times have 
always been times of increased missionary activity and giv- 
ing? 

10. Why is the United States to-day in a favorable 
position for world-spiritual influence? Would it have had 
such a position if it had stayed out of the war? 

11. What is the relation of power to the world pro- 
gram of Christianity? 

12. What is the meaning of "stewardship"? 

13. What do you think constitutes a "call" for Chris- 
tian service abroad or at home ? 

14. How can the sympathies and generosity which the 
war has aroused be conserved after the war is over? 

15. What appear to you the strongest reasons for a 
thorough mobilization of Methodism for her world cam- 
paign? 



112 CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR DEMOCRACY 



SUGGESTIONS FOR COLLATEKAL HEADING 

The Call of a World Task. By F. Lovell Murray. Student Volunteer 

Movement, 25 Madison Avenue, New York. 
The Soul of Democracy. By Edward Howard Griggs. The Macmillan 

Company. 
The Churches of Christ in War Time. Edited by C. S. Macfarland. 

Missionary Education Movement. 
South American Neighbors. By Homer C. Stuntz. The Methodist 

Book Concern. 
The Kenaissance of Latin America. By Harlan P. Beach. Missionary 

Education Movement. 
The Changing Chinese. By Edward A. Boss. The Century Company. 
China: An Interpretation. By James W. Bashford. The Methodist 

Book Concern. 
The New Era in Asia. By Sherwood Eddy. Missionary Education 

Movement. 

THE MISSIONAKY CENTENAEY 

Booklets and Folders of Helpful Information 

The Place of Prayer in God's Plan of World Conquest. By James M. 

Campbell. 5 cents. 
Preparing for Tomorrow. Free. 

The Next Hundred Years. By W. E. Doughty. Free. 
The Centenary World Program: What It Is and What It Proposes. 

Free. 
Foreign Missions and World Democracy. 10 cents. 
Why Launch a World Program in War Times. By John K. Mott. Free. 

All the above will be sent on receipt of 15 cents. 

Address, Joint Centenary Committee, 111 Fifth Avenue, New York, 
N. Y. 



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